Natural search engine optimisation is no longer just a technical pursuit, but the art of true find-ability in a network with no boundaries. Your customers must drive your strategy. That means understanding the desires and behaviour of your customers. Reputation must be earned and not faked. That means being a useful part of your network. Think beyond the website.
As we all know, SEOMoz has recently launched its latest toy, an Open Site Explorer. I am going to assume that you have been playing around with it for a bit now. I will also recommend you to read SEOGadget’s post with some tips and ideas.
But I am here to tell you how Open Site Explorer and Microsoft Excel combined can help you when researching links against your competitors.
Let’s use the term “shoes”. First of all, let’s see how the top 10 compare in terms of external links. To do this, I will run all the URLs in Open Site Explorer.
And then filter all links to show only Followed links from external pages to this page.
And then export it to CSV. You will get a nice excel file with all the links (up to 10000, but not many pages will exceed that number) that linkscape think are relevant. Cool. Let’s do that 10 times, with all the URLs in the top 10. Read more…
Today Bing announced a new development with their auto suggest feature. The auto suggest feature is not a new development, both Google and Yahoo! have had this functionality for a while now.
The auto suggest feature aids the user by analysing the characters that are being typed into the search box and suggesting possible search terms that the user may be looking for to speed up the search process – and also highlight possible search refinements to return more targeted results.
The recent development brought out by Bing is that these suggested search terms are being informed not only by user search behaviour but also by breaking news and trending search queries:
“In fact, we recently incorporated breaking news and hot trending queries within autosuggest. Updated every 15 minutes, trending queries balance timeliness and relevance to connect you with the most prominent or topical events happening now.”
The following examples from Bing’s announcement post highlights this new feature action:
If you didn’t get a chance to watch the Golden Globe Awards, autosuggest helps you get to the latest news and recent winners:
I am currently doing a bit of personal development by spending regular time with the PPC team to learn what they do, and to find areas where our two departments can help and learn from each other. “Synergy” if you speak business-talk.
We recently had a session looking at the Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) feeds that we run, and an interesting point came out of it. This point was about the amount of coverage a brand could have on a single SERP where there are Natural Search results, Paid Search results, and Product results from Google Product Search.
What are CSE’s?
Comparison Shopping Engines are sites like Shopping.com, Nextag, and Ciao, where retailers can submit a product feed of all their current stock, and these sites can then provide their users with huge lists of products in a selection of categories. Retailers can gain incremental sales from users who may not have used search in their purchase process. The CSEs make their money from charging a CPC on all the referrals to the retailer sites.
As part of our decade in search series I wanted to pick out a few highlights that have caught my eye in 2009. We know of late Google has been pumping out new products and services quicker than Santa delivers presents. However, before we even touch the wonderful world of Google let’s take a quick look at what was called a pretender to Google before we really understood its main purpose.
The Pretender
WolframAlpha is “an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer as a search engine would”. With that in mind this young pretender turns in to a no hoper if you were planning to do conventional queries. But where it comes in to its own specific data related queries or referencing. One of the weird ones is the ISBN barcode
Yes that’s right. It’s pulled up the corresponding barcode for the ISBN number. I’m not sure this will leave any of the search engines quaking in their boots.
A Familiar Friend
Nevertheless moving on to another new but familiar friend we have Bing who also made a splash in 2009. Bing is the new search engine from Microsoft that was formerly known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search.
Just like with their names Microsoft keep trying to improve their search engine. However apart from the name changing Microsoft have made an effort to bring something new to its service. First of all the ever changing homepage image which has always impressed me each time I see it. Another is how Bing now organises search results into categories. For instance typing in Margret Thatcher will allow you to see the normal set of results on the right hand side but on the left there are options to delve in to more relevant and related results such as the ones listed below:
Not to be left out Yahoo! made a deal with Microsoft that would mean Bing would power Yahoo! Search. This all being said Google has pretty much owned this year and not just because of the size of the power house search engine but the developments they have put live.
Here Comes Google
The Vince update that boosted big brand websites within Google SERP’s was the cause of much conversation here as iCrossing UK. Liz Ayers and David Peiris did some fantastic analysis trying to unravel how Google might be using it’s algorithm to display this SERP’s . I’d advise you to take some time out and have a good read of it.
Caffeine was another update that was more focused on upgrading the engine of Google rather than the enhancements of the algorithm. Matt Cutts explains on the Webmaster Central blog that “The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results” and that this update is “the first step in a process that will let Google (us) push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”
Google Social Search is a personal favourite of mine and is an experiment featured in Google Labs. Basically “Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results.” Right now in Brighton it’s snowing so a quick search shows this for the term ’snow’
The content areas that Google uses can be broken down in to three areas (Web Search Help):
Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles.
Web content, such as status updates, tweets, and reviews, from social services that your friends have listed in their Google profiles.
Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions.
To find this content Google uses your social circle. “The following people make up your social circle:
People you’re connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter and FriendFeed.
People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers contact groups for Google.
It’s all very logical, simple in it’s idea but very clever and useful. If you want to find out more try watching MattCutts (with his lovely shiny Minority Report looking head, sorry Matt I couldn’t resist.)
“..Immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before”
Of course the main difference between Social search and Real time search is that latter is focused on topic, trending and drawing content from sources that will predominately feature outside your social circle. Not stopping there Google’s personalisation that was only available to users who had Google accounts changed its policy and made it available signed-out users worldwide using a 180 day cookie. This means the traditional ranking factors that Google uses to rank still are valid. However in your day to day searching your frequently visited sites will be more prominent in your search results where relevant. This has caused a real stir in the SEO community but like always this is yet another opportunity for the digital community to come together and provide digital strategy as opposed to single channel marketing.
Well that’s what caught my eye in 2009. It’s been a very challenging year for us all and will be the year that saw social come in to its own. I wish you the very best of luck in 2010 and I leave you with this final link that made me smile.
2008, eh? Well, something must have happened during it, since iCrossing kept paying me. ::surreptitiously consults Google Timeline::
Insofar as a BIG THEME can be detected, (besides the ongoing Yahoo! soap opera), it would be wirelessness. Google began the year by bidding heavily in the US wireless spectrum auction, not to win but to bust the cash threshold that forced open-access rules on to the winner. By freakish coincidence, the Android mobile OS was being demoed by May and launched on the shiny G1 in September.
Google also released this awesome comic strip drawn by the Infinite Canvas guy. It was about a browser or something? I forget.
Meanwhile in the trenches:
As is traditional, around April we all hallucinated an algorithm update, triggering weeks of the usual Beaker-like shrilling in SEO fora around the world. As is also traditional, Matt Cutts denied all knowledge of it, despite inadvertently dubbing it Dewey. The industry also freaked out over a couple of waves of visible PageRank penalisation - apparently aimed in the direction of link sellers. But no, wait - PageRank doesn’t mean anything anymore! Phew.
Also, in no particular order:
Googlebot began crawling through certain HTML forms to discover content not conventionally linked to.
Google brought in 10-box results for local blended search, replacing the previous 3-box - because I know *I* just can’t get enough locksmiths in my morning SERP.
Long-tail freaks celebrated as the average number of keywords per search went from 3 to 4.
Redirects and vanity URLs became invalid as AdWords display URLs from April, causing PPC teams to become grouchy and overly attached to certain coffee mugs.
Cuil demonstrated that a dorky misspelled name is necessary but insufficient for online success.
2007. Sun was shining, skies were blue, and SEO was relatively quiet. By 2007 I had been working in SEO for a while now, and enjoying it more every day in sunny Madrid.
The most significant change of 2007 would be the launch of the iPhone. The revolutionary device from Apple would change mobile search forever. With unlimited internet access everywhere, it has never been easier to search on the go. Yahoo!, Live and Google would start redesigning its engines for mobile and starting adding functionalities such as personalised results depending on your location.
Google would quickly react by announcing Android OS, an operating system that would make its debut the following year.
2007 is also the year that Google reaches 1 trillion (1 000 000 000 000) pages indexed. Everyone knew that the web was a big place, but no search engine had ever indexed that many URLs. By doing that Google shows to the world that they are the leading search engine.
Street View was launched in Google Maps. With only 5 cities from the USA available, it was the first time that something similar had seen the light. The ability of seeing streets as if you were there was a breakthrough. Many people complained because the lack of privacy, but the functionalities of Street View would quickly silence the complaints.
Lastly, Google announced Google Gears, an application that would let you download content from GReader (and GMail in a later stage) so you can read them offline. Gears would be later rolled out to several more applications so these can be used offline.
As I was saying at the start, 2007 was a really quiet year compared with 2006, especially for Yahoo! and Live. But it would all change in the following years.
What about you? Where were you in 2007? Do you think I have missed something important? Let me know in the comments!
So the year was 2006 - I was at Aston Uni (or “up north” as my colleagues would describe L ) studying for my post-grad. Looking back now, that year was pretty significant for my future career choice as that was the first time I’d ever heard of SEO. My group was randomly assigned a report topic for an e-marketing module - you’ve guessed it - SEO. We thought we had drawn the short straw at the time as it sounded complicated and way too techy even for the average nerd (erm….)
Anyway, I wanted to share one of the examples we used in the report to describe “black hat” SEO - one I still refer to today - the case of BMW Germany.
The German BMW site was penalised for cloaking (showing one thing to a user and a completely different thing to a search engine)/ creating ‘doorway pages’. Danny Sullivan called it a “poor man’s cloaking” - When users click on the URL in search engine results, a JavaScript redirect would occur taking users to a slick looking page.
I have to admit I didn’t find this one but as it’s our Christmas Office party tonight I thought I’d share this fun find. Go to Google and click the “I’m feeling lucky” button ensuring though there is nothing in the search box. Once clicked you get the countdown clock.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Natural Search Team
Staying Competitive in 2010 is the next in the series of iCrossing hosted events attracting many clients wanting to hear from our search specialists on how to stay ahead of the game in 2010. Doug Platts, Head of Natural Search and Tom Jones, Head of Media gave a snapshot of this year followed by a compelling look at 2010, highlighting these 3 key areas to ensure 2010 is successful for your brand:
Integrate your marketing including aligning your goals, sharing data, paid and natural search synergy, consistent messaging and measurement
Flexibility to change and adapt when necessary including real time marketing, contingency planning and response time
Try one new thing including measurement, engagement, tools, brand recognition, and creating advocates
Here’s the presentation with accompanying notes for your own use.
2005 was, once again, the year of Google. It all began with exciting news from Microsoft, Bill Gates unveiled their “revolutionary” search engine called… well…. MSN Search. What was its secret weapon? Encarta. Yes, really. While it was a good idea to include factual answer in SERPs, the idea never really gained any popularity and Encarta was soon forgotten by most of the world.
But going back to Google, it was its year because of the amount of amazing products that they launched. It all started with iGoogle. While the service was not a success at first, it was a clever move from the big G. The ability of adding widgets and integrate all your google products in the homepage was the first step of many to come towards a more personalised experience in search engines.
It was quickly followed by Google Reader and Google Talk. RSS readers and instant messaging was nothing new, many services provided similar functionalities. However, none of their competitors had such a strong platform to launch their services. Again, while these were not a massive success at first, they slowly gained reputation and trust from happy costumers and end up becoming very succesfull services.
Google would later launch Google Blogs, a search engine only for blogs. This was significant for two reasons. One, Google started to recognise the power of social media and give it its own space, something that Google has had in mind since then. And two… erm… well, you know, it was a big year for blogs.
But the big (and I mean BIG) thing in 2005 was Maps. Google Maps was the first real, free and complete map service on the internet. Remember when we all spent hours and hours in front of the screen finding new and exciting places in Google maps?
But wait! There is ONE MORE THING. Google Analytics. Having acquired Urchin on March, it was only a matter of time until this service was released. It was the first time that such an advanced analytics system was free and available to all. Its intuitive usability and great interface was a recipe for success.
Lastly, here is a video from 2005 that shows the views from the “experts” at the time:
Gregory Damas on 
Chris Eden on 
mark rushworth on 
Addam Hassan on 
Prachi D on 
Sam on 
Tim Aldissi on 
