The Long Tail

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The phrase “the long tail” is becoming more and more popular. I’m going to explain what it is and why you should care.

The long tail refers to all of those keyword phrases that just get a few searches per day. For example, the phrase “church” probably gets thousands of searches per day, but the phrase “contemporary church in Little Rock, AR” gets maybe one search per day.

The reason you should care about this is two-fold:

1 – You’re never going to rank well for a big phrase like that. Just learn that and move on.

2 – There are millions and millions of long tail searches every day. In fact, Google says that about 25% of the searches on its site are search queries that have never been used before. Think about that. Hundreds of millions of searches per day, probably close to a trillion searches all time, yet there are tens of millions of searches every day that have never been done before. It’s staggering.

At the church I worked for last year, we had a total of 45,383 visits from search engine queries last year. Those 45,000 visits came from 15,831 different

search phrases. There is no way to prepare for all of those, so you need to design your site to rank well for anything related to it.

Why should you care?

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You should care because these people are looking for you, whether they know it or not. While you want to rank well for “your city church” and “your city worship” and things like that, you need to make sure you’re covered for other things that people might be searching for in your area.

One thing I did was to go around to most of the staff in the church and ask “if you were new to this area, what would you search for to find a church around here”? They key was to not give them any hints – just raw answers. I then took those queries and ran them to see how we ranked. Some were good, some were ok, and some were pitiful. I took the pitiful results and tried to improve them.

For example, that church is in the city of Marietta. A search for “Marietta church” did pretty well. However, many people also call it “East Cobb” (east side of Cobb County). A search for “East Cobb church” didn’t have us in there anywhere. The fix? I put “located in East Cobb County” in the footer of every page. It helps people that know the area get a little better idea of where we were, but it also helped us rank better for “east cobb” and for “cobb county”.

Try it with your church. Here are some to get you started:

  • your city church
  • your city worship
  • your city VBS
  • your city sunday school
  • your city bible study

If you have a rec program, see how you rank for those. Things like:

  • your city children’s baseball
  • your city co-ed softball

Try your staff members. Just Google their names and see if your church comes up near the top. Unless they have a very common name, their page on your church site should come up near the top.

If you find you’re ranking poorly for some phrase and you don’t know how to fix it, feel free to leave a comment below with details and I’ll try to help you out.

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Great article about why simple is better

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In the past, I’ve been pushed to add many things to church sites that might be nice, but rather unnecessary.  Some I was able to easily convince people that we didn’t need ($5000 for “virtual tour”), others were harder to battle (“why isn’t the whole site FLASH?”).

Then today I found this article: Why Your Fancy Web Site Sucks

I agree with it 100%. 🙂

Google’s “Build Your Campus in 3D” winners announced

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteAs announced on the Google Lat Long blog, today Google revealed the winners of their “Build Your Campus in 3D Competition“. They are:

  • University of Minnesota – Department of Architecture
  • Purdue University – Departments of Computer Graphics Technology and Education
  • Concordia University, Loyola Campus – Department of Civil Engineering
  • Stanford University – Department of Architectural Design
  • Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) – Departments of Engineering and Computer Science
  • Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering – Department of Engineering
  • Dartmouth College – Departments of Computer Science and Digital Art

The winners get to fly out to Mountain View in August for a 3-day visit and workshop.  Fun prize!

Even better, Google says that nearly 4,000 buildings were modeled and submitted for this contest.   That will certainly give their 3D content a boost when all of that is pushed into Google Earth.

Good page titles

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteI find myself often talking about the importance of good page titles, so I thought I’d get all of the info into one place.

The page title is very important for a number of reasons:

  • It was what people see in their toolbar when your site is open.
  • It is the default text when someone bookmarks a page on your site.
  • It is a very important factor into how well you rank in Google and other search engines.
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Keep in mind those three things when creating your titles.  This is not the place to be saying things like “welcome” — use the actual page for that.

My standard suggestion for a church site is to use “church name – city, state – page info”.  Here are some examples:

  • First United Methodist Church – Atlanta, GA – Youth Ministry
  • Bostwick Lake Baptist Church – Saginaw, MI – Children’s Events
  • Mt. Paran Church of God – Marietta, GA – Sermon Archive

You get the idea.  Also, it’s usually best to spell out your church name rather than abbreviate it, as in “First United Methodist Church” rather than “First UMC”.  You want to rank well for “methodist” and “church”, don’t you?

The Gerber Life Grow-Up Plan

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteI’ve not looked close enough at this plan to see if it’s anything that parents should do, but I have no confidence in their ability to keep track of money. Check out this chart they show during their commercials:

The bar on the left represents $10,000. The one on the right represents $20,000. Notice anything strange? The bar on the right is nearly three times as large as the bar on the left, not just double the size.

I realize that the one on the left is set back a little bit, but not nearly enough to cover that kind of difference. Also, I have to say that I got this idea from an old article on cockeyed.com that dealt with Quicken in almost the same way.

Niagara Falls

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe Virtual Earth / Live Maps blog just pointed out how great Niagara Falls looks in Virtual Earth. I have to admit, it’s quite stunning. I thought I’d go a step further and compare it to the same shot in Google Earth.

As you’ll see, there is no comparison. I have to imagine that Microsoft has done a bit of hand-tweaking to make the falls look so good, while Google obviously has not. If they wanted, Microsoft could tweak little areas all over the world to create fake examples of how much better their product is. That being said, this isn’t even close. Virtual Earths imagery looks better, the altitude mesh is much more precise, and they have 3D buildings all around the area.

Here are the two programs side by side (click thumbnails for full-size images):

Niagara Falls in Virtual Earth
(view in VE)
Niagara Falls in Virtual Earth		 Niagara Falls in Google Earth
(view in GE)
Niagara Falls in Google Earth

How Google Earth [Really] Works

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteStefan at Ogle Earth

point out a fascinating article about what really makes Google Earth tick.  It’s written by Avi Bar-Ze’ev, who helped develop Google Earth back when it was still known as Keyhole.  It’s a very tech-heavy article about how you go from having terabytes worth of imagery to then rendering it all on a 3D globe.  Good stuff.

Virtual Earth finding its way onto more consumer-oriented business sites

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Reading Time: 2 minutesI’m finding more and more sites lately that are using Virtual Earth as their on-site mapping program.  The latest is Bank of America (via the VE dev blog).  It’s got a unique issue in that it claims to require that you enter your City, State and ZIP, but it appears that ZIP-only will work (as it should).

Another fairly new one is Weather.com (here is the radar for my area).  However, its got one big problem – static radar images only.  A static radar doesn’t help me decide if rain is on the way, as it could be coming from a variety of different angles.  All that a static radar will do is tell me if it’s raining right now — I have windows that serve the same purpose.  (btw – if you want a nice animated radar, I’ve always been a big fan of AccuWeather)

Finally, we have Harry Norman realtors.  We used them to buy our current house and we’re big fans.  I told them a few times that they should put their listings into a Google Earth network link, as that would be great for potential buyers.  I had been putting all of our “homes to see” into GE, along with local Target stores, Publix, Chick-Fil-A and other places that we enjoy, just to see how it shakes out.  Dropping all of that into a nice GE network link would be amazingly easy, but repeated e-mails to them have gone completely unanswered.

Anyhow, here is their “Map Search”.  As you zoom in, you can see where all of the Harry Norman offices are located.  Wait, what?  Yep.  Their map shows all of their offices for you, but no houses.  A link in the corner shows how many listings would be on the map, which you can click to show in a big long list.  While I suppose it beats nothing, it’s really quite pitiful.

One final complaint – none of these maps support the Space Navigator.  At all.  As the Google Earth Blog said a while back, the Virtual Earth interface has a rather “clunky” mouse interface.  I agree completely.

All of that being said, it’s impressive to see these big companies choosing to use Virtual Earth rather than Google Maps (or Earth, in some cases).  This battle between Google and MS should only continue to heat up, which will ultimately benefit all of us in the form of better products.

Google Maps – Click and Drag Directions

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis is really cool. Once you’ve created directions in Google Maps (via a new click interface), you can drag various parts of your route. Check out the video below for a brief demonstration:

More details can be found at the Google LatLong blog.