This is one of those Basic SEO posts, that i feel silly writing about because "everybody knows" this information already. But then I look at websites of prospects and I realize that not everybody really does know. Or maybe they do and they just forget. In any case, this will be a quick reminder / refresher.
Most duplicate content issues have to do with on-page content. Mass page/content duplication can often have a negative effect on how the search engines spider and index your site. While I believe the title tag is the single most important piece of real estate on your site, duplication here is likely to have the least effect on the search engine crawlers. Even still, it's a duplicate issue that absolutely must be addressed for tactical SEO performance.
Duplicate titles is something we often see on newly developed websites or content management systems that don't allow proper control of individual pages. While I get how, when developing new websites, the title tag can get overlooked, I'm still amazed that many internet savvy software developers still don't take title tag customization into account.
In some cases it's just a matter of some creative programming to fix. In others it might require some significant reworking of the system, or a scraping of the system altogether. And, of course, other times it's just a matter of taking the time to get into your HTML or your CMS and writing unique title tags for all your products and content pages. If you have a lot of products or pages, this can be time consuming, but it's well worth the effort.
If you can pull it off with your CMS, allow Titles to be automatically generated based on on-page criteria, but also give yourself the opportunity to overwrite the defaults with your own customization. This is especially handy for product pages. The default can display essentially the breadcrumb trail of categories down to the products as the default. This will ensure all your title tags are unique, to a degree. But at some point you may want to get in and create a unique title tag for more punch and better search engine rankings. Having both options will give you the greatest degree of control without having duplicate titles until you get around to customizing them.
Do whatever you need to do to make your title tags unique. And by unique, I mean, not tied to any other element on the web page such as the header or breadcrumb trail.
Having unique titles on every page is great, but not if they are always identical to the your page's headers and breadcrumbs. This just creates a different form of duplication.
There are some cases when it makes sense to have your Title tag and H1 tag in very close alignment. Typically this is done in blogs or other informational articles. But I still recommend keeping an element of control that will allow you to change them to be unique whenever it makes sense to do so.
All said and done, your titles should:
Short, 65 characters max
Unique for each page
Accurately reflects page content
Contains main keywords
This article is a continuation in my series on duplicate content. Follow the links below to read more:
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This week we're looking at an e-commerce website for educational toys, Brainwaves Toys. I met the proprietor, Karen, at Small Business Marketing Unleashed
last month. She's having a blast with the site because she's passionate
about what she sells, but she's new to website marketing and looking
for ways to improve.
As always, I asked three questions that are critical to guiding website analysis:
Who is your target audience: Mothers, fathers, grandparents, other adults who care about a child's development. Homeschoolers, teachers, preschools.
What is your unique selling proposition:
One stop shop for hand-picked toys and games that enhance a child's
learning, sense of play and educational development. Great resource for
homeschoolers and teachers. We can gift-wrap many toys before shipping.
What is your main website goal: Online purchase.
The
current Brainwaves site has done many things well, especially usability
of the shopping cart and checkout process. However, it needs a little
help with design and navigation to get visitors to that point.
Navigation: Which one do I use and where in the world do I start? Research
shows that confusing navigation is the number one way to lose
customers. If people have a hard time finding their way around your
website, they're just going to give up and leave. And when you have
great products that really sell themselves like Brainwaves does, you
don't want your navigation to get in the way of a sale.
When
you enter on the Brainwaves homepage, there are three different ways to
navigate the site. There is a global horizontal bar organized by age
group. There's a global vertical bar that's not particularly organized
at all and mixes functional (shop by price, age) with topical. And
there's another featured section in the middle that is also organized
by topic, some of which are in the left sidebar and some that aren't.
The housekeeping links such as about us and contact are buried in the
footer. While they need to be there, they also need to be more
prominent "above the fold" (visible without having to scroll).
With
the variety of toys for sale on Brainwaves, I like the idea of having
two sets of navigation: one for age and one for toy category. It seems
sensible that people would use one of those two systems to browse.
However, they should be kept entirely separate from each other.
Research
also shows that users scan web pages, and won't bother to look at lists
with more than 5-7 links. If you have more than that, break them up
into categories and subcategories that are logical and easy to scan.
Always
keep your customers in mind; organize your navigation in a way that
makes sense to them, call each link what they would call it
("educational toys" takes visitors to the home page, so call it
"home"!), and make it easy to scan and browse. If you aren't sure if
your organization or labeling (words in the links) make sense to your
customers, test it! Find a friend who is in your target market and ask
his/her opinion.
Design: Use the header to say who/what you are and draw people in. There is so much going on in the header of this website, that the main message is getting lost.
There are two items that should be in the header of every website:
Company/website name
Tagline/benefit statement.
Tagline The
header is your chance to tell visitors what this website is about and
why you are unique. It needs to be the first place people look. And be
sure to create the tagline as html, not in an image. Search engine
spiders ignore images, and a strong tagline that says what you are
about and uses your primary keywords help search engines and people to
classify your site.
This particular tagline "Educational Toys
for Gifted Children," uses a primary keyword and states simply what
visitors will find on the site. But it doesn't tell visitors why this
site is unique. And I'm afraid the phrase "gifted children" will turn a
good portion of visitors away. It really needs to be re-worked to
include the unique selling proposition. For example:
"Hand-picked educational toys that enhance learning, development, and sense of play"
It
says exactly what you'll find on the site, (toys to enhance learning,
development, and sense of play), includes a primary key phrase
(educational toys), and says why the site is unique (hand-picked).
Images Use
the header to display images that target your audience and draw people
in. While the Verified Merchant and GeoTrust logos are good to include
on the site somewhere, they aren't important enough to take up such a
prominent location, and can go below the fold or in a sidebar. I'd love
to see an image of a child playing watched by a parent or a grandparent
... something colorful that screams "for kids."
Keep in mind
that the header should be consistent on every single page of the
website. Remember, on average only 5% of your visitors will enter at
the home page anyway (and that's a good thing!).
Marketing: You've got a great personality, so use it! The
best way for a small business to compete online with the big guys is to
let their personalities shine through. I've met Karen, so I know
first-hand that she's got a vivacious, passionate, knowledgeable, and
endearing personality. She's incredibly passionate about educational
toys that foster creativity and learning. She's a mom who has raised
three children. She surfs the internet and hand picks every one of the
toys that she sells through Brainwaves. What parent wouldn't connect
with that instead of a cold, distant corporation just looking to make a
buck?
There are ways to leverage a great personality both on and
off site. I'd love to see a letter from Karen and/or a bio on the about
page. She could really play up that Brainwaves is a "mom and pop" shop
run by a mom who is passionate about learning. Adding her voice to the
copy and using her personality as a main selling point would definitely
boost trust and interest in her target market. I'd even include a
picture of Karen and her family. On the contact form, say that visitors
are contacting Karen directly, not just a help desk. In the product
descriptions, incorporate the "hand-picked" unique selling point by
saying why each item was chosen.
This is the kind of situation
where I would definitely recommend that Karen start a blog. She's a
good writer, passionate about her product and site, and has a lot to
say. Her blog could feature cool new products as she finds them, talk
about child development and learning, and share personal stories of
raising her three kids. A blog would showcase her personality and
knowledge, build trust, and drive links and traffic to the Brainwaves
website.
She could also build relationships by sharing her
expertise and passion by leaving comments on other blogs and getting
involved in parenting and education forums. Remember, you must always
contribute relevant information to the discussion; these ARE NOT place
to sell your products or just link to your site.
Usability: An easy checkout process is key to sales. The Brainwaves website does a great job of making it easy for users to buy:
The view cart, checkout, and submit buttons are large and easy to find.
The process is as simple and clean as possible.
Errors are clearly marked and easy to fix.
Visitors can easily go back a step to make changes to their cart or personal information
There are short explanations of the process on each page.
The steps in the process are well-labeled at the top of each page and indicate where you are in the process.
A few general issues I noticed:
The
site-wide font size is way too small. One of the primary targets is
grandparents, but there's no way they'll be able to read the site with
decreasing vision. Bump it up at least two sizes.
The
checkout page asks you to log in or register. However, the username and
password are not required fields, so it is possible to checkout without
actually registering. This needs to be explained, or have separate
options for "returning users," "create an account," or "go straight to
checkout." Some people will be more likely to buy if they know that
registration is optional.
There's
a thank you page after submitting a message through the contact form.
However, it should provide links back to key content as well as saying
thank you.
There's too much happening on the homepage. It needs
to include just a few sentences (with keywords!) overviewing the site,
and then drive visitors to deeper content.
Pull the customer
review section up under each product so that it is one of the first
boxes under the product description. When a customer makes a purchase,
ask them to come back and review the product on the confirmation
page/email and include the link back.
The general
structure of the Brainwaves website is good and the product
descriptions are strong. With a few key changes to the navigation,
adding some personality, and re-focusing the header, this site could
really stand out.
Thanks For Your Submissions I
was overwhelmed over the past week by the many website submissions for
review in this column. If you submitted your site, it may be a while
until I get to it. I will email you a heads up the week that I review
your site.
If you are a small business and would like to
submit your site for review in this weekly column, email your URL and
the following information to jackie@sitelogic.com:
who are your primary and secondary target audiences?
what is your unique selling proposition (what makes you stand out)?
what is your main goal for your website (sales, leads, page views)?
Want more from your web site? Search Influence can help! Targeted Traffic. Increased Revenue. Results Guaranteed. Customized Internet Marketing you can afford.
Sage addresses the failure of Microsoft's attempt to buy Yahoo!. The winners and losers of the whole ordeal are brought to light in an article by Andy Beale at Marketing Pilgrim, in which, ironically, Google comes out top winner, despite Yahoo!'s successful acquisition of Fast Search. Google also takes center stage with their artist-driven iGoogle themes that are now available, and the art of web development has a new resource thanks to Danny Dover at SEOmoz who came up the "The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet."
Want more from your web site? Search Influence can help! Targeted Traffic. Increased Revenue. Results Guaranteed. Customized Internet Marketing you can afford.
Twitter and DirectTV go head to head this week by creating and solving customer service issues at the same time. Mack Collier's article "Worst Example of a Company Twittering?" exposes DirectTV's bumbled use of Twitter, explains the frustration that can cause, and encourages companies to use social media tools "as the rest of us do." The DirectTV/Twitter saga actually begins with Stoney deGeyter's tweet about the company's presence, is filled in with his article "Why DirectTV is Losing My Heart (and Quite Possible My Business)," and then ends with another tweet about the company's immediate response to his customer service issue.
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Beth Kanter of Beth's Blog recently published an interview she did with Jonathan Colman of The Nature Conservancy. Jonathan is their Associate Director of Digital Marketing and he shared some insight on how the Nature Conservancy (a non-profit) was using social media as part of their marketing mix.
A lot of the interview struck home and made me think about the parallels between traditional linking and social media promotion. While I agree the two entities are different animals and call for seperate strategies, the bottom line is the same for both... to increase traffic and link love.
With some people holding SEO to the fire for exploiting social media, I thought it might be interesting to look at those parallels based on comments made in the interview and see if there's any common ground. Let's start with this one:
...one of the most interesting parts of engaging in social media is how you can measure just about everything that you do. The real challenge, of course, is to determine the meaning behind those numbers.
There's been some chatter on how links generated through social media are somehow less relevant than those secured through traditional link building methods. In traditional link building you identify a link, assign value to it and then proceed to do what you can to get it. If you're successful in securing the link, it becomes a commodity because of where it came from and the importance you placed on securing it.
It's the opposite with social media. You put the content out there and if you're lucky you'll see big traffic and some quality inbound links. Generating links through the social networks can be a crapshoot, you get what you get. Unlike traditional linking, you can't pinpoint where those links will come from or control which sites to target.
So the question is, are the links generated through social media campaigns any less efficient?
The short answer is -it depends on your goal. In today's linking landscape it's important to secure links from high quality sites, and/or those in your niche for maximum ranking impact. Getting links from places like CNN and The Huffington Post are also great provided they aren't dynamic. But if you're looking to generate eyeballs and traffic, then general links in massive quantities are fine, it should be easy to determine their effectiveness.
Here's another comment Jonathan made:
... another principle strategy of ours: connecting with people where they are rather than making find us. ...Rather than force people to come to our site ... we're happy to ind them where they're already engaged and introduce them to the Conservancy in venues of their choice.
Advertising/participating on sites your customers frequent when they're not on your site, that's just smart marketing. It's why keeping them engaged through reviews, surveys and customer commenting on your site is so important. Use your site to pull the info you need to find out where they are. No matter what type of linking campaign you do, you need to know what your customers want, where they are and what sites to target. That's Marketing 101.
He then went on to comment on some specific tactics/sites the Nature Conservancyy was using:
I routinely bookmark and comment on environmental news, green blogs, and stories about sustainability and alternative energy technology. One of our foremost social media strategies is to try to link to and promote as many stories as possible outside of our own site.
When we talk about link popularity as a concept, we tend to overlook the importance of topical relevance for the more impactful issues like anchor text and quality links. It's a given that anchor text and inbound links are strong factors but it's equally important to establish community relevance by linking out to sites within your community. By finding and linking to sites hosting your demographic, you work the opportunity from both sides... you get targeted eyeballs and establish your site in a cited, topical network.
.... with Digg visitors, these folks just viewed the landing page and most of them immediately left without viewing any other pages. But that's OK, because our popularity on Digg drove in 50+ links from blogs, including a few elite sources like The Huffington Post and Cisco.com, and also caused "spillover" popularity into other social news networks. The real value from this particular success on Digg wasn't so much the initial spike in traffic, but the increased SEO positioning and second wave of visitors coming from blogs and other sites.
The article being referenced can be found here on Digg , some of the "spillover" sites he mentions are Mixx, Hugg, Care2, Reddit, Magnolia, and Netscape . While you may not get as many votes from any one of these "spillover" sites as you would Digg (provided the story went hot), put them all together and their numbers are impressive.
You'll also get a wider circle of inbound links which is good for establishing a varied linking pattern and increasing visibility overall.
I turn to Twitter to publicize my social media campaigns, usually the ones on Digg. ... a handful of friends following these tweets ... actually click through and vote on the stories. Twitter, Pownce, even IM can be used to draw people into your campaigns...
I've noticed a change in the way people are using Twitter these days. When I started it was more conversational but now, people seem to be using it to annouce new blog posts, ask questions and ask for Diggs/Fetches/Sphinns. More than once I've picked up an URL or a new site that's been helpful; I added a link I saw on Twitter to a recent SEL column, I had finished the post and was ready to send it in when the "tweet" happened. Being able to find and react to information that quickly is every marketer's dream.
Cherry picking links is still a good idea, you target what you want and what you know you need. Social media is good for spreading the word while attracting links in the process. The links are less targeted but no less efficient or important to your overall inbound link graph. Successful link building is about blending both and loving the results.
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Yesterday, I stumbled across a large ad agency website that promised to be interesting. As soon as I clicked on the link in Google, my senses were assaulted by a splash page, followed by a Flash intro, all before I could enter the site. Yes, it took two clicks before I was even at the homepage...that is appalling! Why on earth is anyone in this day and age still creating websites with splash pages and Flash intros, let alone both on the same site! That borders on visitor abuse.
This particular agency claimed to have won lots of awards, create ground-breaking campaigns, along with all kinds of other lofty promises, and yet they couldn't even get their own usability issues under control! Wow, talk about missing the point. If I was a potential client, I would have been out the door as soon as I saw the splash page.
Ditch the lofty ideas and focus on the users.
Big ideas are great when executed with usability in mind, but when the they become a hindrance to users, it's time to go back to basics. Why? Because unhappy users don't convert. You won't sell product, you won't get contracts, and you won't achieve your other conversion metrics if you make people want to run away.
Navigation is the Foundation of Usability
The first and foremost element of good usability is navigation. Almost all other usability issues are built on, or in some way related to navigation. This article will focus on some key tips you can use to improve your site's navigation.
Navigation 101: 3 Clicks or Bust
When someone visits your site for the first time, it's often their first point of contact with your company, so the relationship with them is quite fragile. On average, people are willing to give you 3 clicks to find what they are looking for, and if they can't reach their target destination within those 3 little clicks, you've lost them. It's extremely important to structure your navigation so that any page of your site can be reached within 3 clicks of any other page, because users don't always enter at the homepage, especially when they come from a search engine.
This point is really what sparked this post. The ad agency mentioned above wasted two of these valuable clicks before a user was ever at the homepage. Take a look at your site: When you have a new visitor, can they get to their target destination in 3 clicks or less? If not, you need to overhaul your navigation. Users tend to get lost without clear navigational paths, so make it easy for them. Take time at the beginning of site development to create a good site map, and sketch out navigational paths.
Redundancy is a good thing.
Provide multiple paths to the same destination. Take x product (or service) and make sure that users can get there through the primary navigation, the contextual links in the text of the site, and through any other paths that make sense, for example through site search results. The key is to think like a user.
Get outside feedback.
When developing a site, especially navigation, it often is necessary to get some people to visit your site who are completely unfamiliar with your site and products/services, and get their feedback. You might be surprised. Often outside feedback can you step back and see some weaknesses you weren't aware of.
Make sure it's easy to read.
Keep in mind that eye-tracking studies have shown the users' eye tend to gravitate toward the top and left sides of the screen, starting with the top left corner, so those are prime locations for navigation. Users should never have to scroll to find navigation buttons/links.
There a many more things that can improve and fine-tune navigation, but these are some easy tips, that if implemented, will improve the user experience at your site.
Want more from your web site? Search Influence can help! Targeted Traffic. Increased Revenue. Results Guaranteed. Customized Internet Marketing you can afford.
There is no better way to create an infinite amount of duplicate content on your site than to force session IDs onto each visitor (and search engine). Typically, session IDs are used for tracking a single visitor's navigation path through the site, including the adding or removing products from the shopping cart. They are great for tracking purposes, but really, really bad for search engines and inbound linking.
Ok, first of all, that's a totally crappy URL shown above, but aside from that, tacked on at the end there is the session ID. Both URLs are the same, all except the session ID. I was able to open the exact same page, with the unique ID simply by starting a new browsers session. The problem is that the session ID constitutes a completely different URL. It's not an issue for the visitor, but it is for the search engines.
Since a new session ID is attached with each new visit, each time the search engine comes around they are essentially fed all new URLs. If you have only a ten page site, the second time the search engines visit they add the "new" 10 pages to the index, for a total of 20 pages. When they come around a third time they now have 30 pages in their index. Once they start analyzing these pages they find page after page after page of duplication.
An additional problem arises as site visitors start bookmarking and linking to your site. Every link they add contains their very own session ID. The search engines follow that link to your site and now you've got another 10 pages of duplication. If they follow another link to your site, that's 10 more. You starting to see where this is going? Essentially you can turn a 10 page site into endless duplications.
Even with a small site you can see why the search engines would stop coming around. But if you have a site with hundreds, or even thousands of products, you find two things happen. 1) The search engines will stop spidering new pages because there is just too much duplication. 2) The engines will start dropping pages out of the index altogether.
There are content management systems that will allow you to withhold the session IDs from search engines. While this is a good option it still has the potential of creating problems with inbound links. Each link will still pass value to the URL with the session. It'll be up to the search engine to make a determination if the URL with the session and the URL without are the same.
The only guaranteed protection is not to do it at all. There are alternate means of tracking users for whatever reason. Avoiding session IDs completely ensures that you don't open yourself up to inadvertent site duplication.
This article is a continuation in my series on duplicate content. Follow the links below to read more:
Want more from your web site? Search Influence can help! Targeted Traffic. Increased Revenue. Results Guaranteed. Customized Internet Marketing you can afford.
I'm probably going to lose a lot of Friends with this post, but I need to get some stuff off my chest about Facebook. If you're a real Friend, you'll listen without judgment. If not, it was nice Facebooking with you. I hope there are no hard feelings left in my wake.
Like most of us, my love affair with Facebook started out hot 'n heavy. Almost daily (sometimes even hourly), I watched my Friend meter go up like an investor watches a stock ticker.
And the sheer voyeurism of it all was just so hard to resist. (Admit it, you've looked
up at least one ex just to see their profile picture or better yet, get
access to their photo album. And you couldn't help but smile to yourself when you noticed their Freshman 15 had turned into the Desk Jockey 30.)
Now, the relationship is starting to bore
me and I don't know what to do about it. In addition to the boredom
(I'm running out of people to spy on, er, I mean beFriend), I find
myself feeling rather annoyed. Often. Yet I don't want to break up with Facebook either. I just want to keep Funny Face around for those Friday nights
when I want to be amused.
While I'm at it, know what annoys me the most about FF? The constant nattering when I don't feel
like talking. Only a few of my Friends do it, but they're kind of
ruining it for my BFFs. Specifically, it's the constant influx of
emails that is making me want to start deFriending like a highschool cheerleader with PMS. I'm not talking
about FunWall notifications either. I turned those off when I became afraid my hard drive was going to crash from Fun
overload. But seriously, where does it say in the Facebook Terms of Use that it
may be used as a list management tool? Where and when did I give
permission to my Friends to use me this way?
"... you agree not to use the Service or the Site to: harvest or
collect email addresses or other contact information of other users
from the Service or the Site by electronic or other means for the
purposes of sending unsolicited emails or other unsolicited
communications ..."
So, you can't harvest emails from your Friends' profiles to market to
them, but what about the Invite Your Friends feature? And how come it
allows you to "Import Email Addresses" from various sources? Seems that Funny Face has developed a split personality. Or an inflated ego.
This relationship is getting complicated. So many rules--written and unwritten--have been broken. I don't want to sound like an ingrate. Funny Face has been good to me. We go back at least a few months. The tapestry of our affair is richly decorated.
Decorated with smileys. And hugs. And dirty video clips. And spam.
I just wanted to hook up with some old friends. Do a little B2B networking. And exchange some niceties now and then.
Facebook, you let me down. And I don't know what to do about it.
Want more from your web site? Search Influence can help! Targeted Traffic. Increased Revenue. Results Guaranteed. Customized Internet Marketing you can afford.
One of the benefits to spending time on Twitter is that it's a great
way to network. But if you are new to Twitter, it can seem difficult
to find people that are in your industry or that share your interests.
Here's some tips to help get you started meeting new friends on Twitter!
Al left a comment to my post on Monday that I'm sure many of you that are new to Twitter can sympathize with:
"Okay, I got an account on Twitter and I've hit a blank wall,
literally. I can't seem to get out of my little box. Perhaps Direct is
having the same problem.
There doesn't seem to be any way to "find" anyone unless you already
know them from somewhere else. How do you make new acquaintances with
similar interests? What's the point in marketing via Twitter if you
can't figure out how to get heard?"
This is a real concern, but thankfully there's several resources that can help you expand your network of friends on Twitter.
First, start on Twitter itself. At the top right of your Twitter homepage you will see a search box that lets you not only search for people, but also by location or any other term that might be in their Twitter profile. If you are looking for other Twitter members in Ohio, search for Ohio, and Twitter will give you a listing of all the members that have their location identified as being 'Ohio'. Or you can search for anyone with 'search marketing' in their profile, or 'social media', or any other term you can think of.
Another great way to find people that share your interests is with the Twitter Packs wiki. Here you can find Twitter users by subject matter, you can find companies that have a presence on Twitter, and even locate people by region. If you are interested in meeting other Twitter members that focus on 'Technology', for example, you can view the list, and even add yourself to this same list so that other members can find you!
My favorite search tool for Twitter is Tweetscan. With Tweetscan, you can search for topics, people, places, anything. You can also search and make sure that you have seen all the replies to you that other Twitter members have left. Just search for '@YourTwitterName'. Sometimes the web version of Twitter as well as Twhirl will miss some of your replies.
But perhaps the best way to meet new people on Twitter is to follow the people that your friends are following. Watch the conversations unfolding, and if you see that one of your friends is having an interesting conversation and replying to someone that you aren't following, then click on that person's name and check out their Twitter page. It could be that they are someone that you would like to follow.
With these tools, you should be able to expand your Twitter network significantly. And the best part is, your Twitter experience becomes much richer and more rewarding as you follow more people.
Want more from your web site? Search Influence can help! Targeted Traffic. Increased Revenue. Results Guaranteed. Customized Internet Marketing you can afford.
I recently had the opportunity to participate in some speed networking at Small Business Marketing: Unleashed. When I told the second person I networked with that I am a PPC manager, she gave me a blank stare and said "I have no idea what PPC is." She's not alone.
Many people do know what PPC advertising is, and where paid advertising is displayed, but my experience at SBMU reminds me that this isn't always the case. So I decided a great first entry for me at Search Engine Guide would be a Boot Camp Style article explaining exactly what paid search advertising looks like.
I tend to talk with my hands, demonstrating what my minds eye is seeing - on the internet, I rely on pictures. So we're all starting from the same place, I'll throw out some screen shots of where paid advertising are displayed on the three major search networks and explain some of the not so obvious details. Then, just to keep things interesting, I'll show you where paid advertising displays in a couple of other search engines.
Google
As Google receives the lion's share of searches we'll start with them. There isn't quite a "hard rule" that is always followed, so I'll give a brief description of where paid ads, or "sponsored links" typically appear. As a general rule, they always appear to the right of the natural results, and quite often (but not always) as the top three results on the page, above the natural listings. When they do display above the natural results, Google shades the background to make it obvious that they are different results than those below. (even though that shading may mean nothing to someone not knowing what paid advertising looks like.)
Occasionally, if your search term is very, very obscure, you'll see only a very few ads, but the most ads that Google will display on any results page is ten. Sometimes there are only one or two ads at the top of the page, and never more than three. But sponsored links always display on the right hand side of the natural results. Google will only 'serve' ten ads per page; if there are more than ten advertisers, Google pushes them to the next page. If all you want to view are sponsored links, then you can click the "more" displayed just below the sponsored links. But you'll still see only ten at a time.
Yahoo
Yahoo seems to get the second number of search volume, so they're second in this discussion. The same general rules that applied to Google, apply to Yahoo as well, but instead of labeling their paid ads as "sponsored links" they're labeled as "sponsored results." Above the top sponsored results, Yahoo will display a list of related searches, labeled as "Also try:.." To further muck things up, you might find Google ads displaying amongst the Yahoo ads because they're currently running a beta test.
MSN
MSN gets the lowest search volume of the three major engines, and again, the rules are very much the same as with Google. Paid ads appear to the right of the natural search results, where they're identified as "sponsored sites." As with Google, depending on the search phrase, you may or may not see sponsored sites displayed above the natural results. MSN displays Related Searches above the sponsored sites on the right; be aware that those results are not advertisements.
So those are the major three players, yet there are dozens of other search engines that people use. Solely for demonstrative purposes, let's take a look at Ask.com and Dogpile.com.
Ask
Ask has their own search engine and their own paid advertising. In years past they used to display search results from their own database along with results from others, including Google. Now they stick to their own database for natural results. They do however participate as part of Goggle's search network, and you will find Google ads displayed along with the Ask ads. Ask highlights their ads above the natural results, never along the right side of the page and they label them as "sponsored results". Along the left side of their search results, they display options that allow you to narrow your search results.
Dogpile
Dogpile is a meta search engine, displaying results from multiple search engines, including Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. The way they display their ads though, is somewhat deceiving. Their "sponsored ads" are a collection from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask, but the secret is that they are mixed up with the natural results. Unless you read the tag that labels listings as , you may never recognize that you're looking at a paid ad.
So there you have it, your first introduction to what Paid Advertising looks like. Now you'll never look at a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) the same, and you'll recognize those hidden advertisements at DogPile. In future posts I'll cover more of the basics, including the limitations of ad text, the importance of relevance and landing pages, discuss CPC, CTR, and you'll get familiar with all the alphabet soup of PPC (Pay Per Click) industry. Don't worry if you don't know what CPC is, or CTR, you will! If at anytime you have specific questions, by all means, post them as a comment and I'll try to answer as best I can!
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