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.
I think I speak for many people when I say that Firefox is getting slower and slower, I for one have been putting up with the sluggish performance for a while now, having to settle for using the lighting fast Google Chrome for less analytical SEO work.
The launch of Google Chrome Extensions has now meant I have now finally been able to leave the sluggish Mozilla Firefox behind and speed my working life up with Google Chrome, yippee!
Switching to Chrome isn’t without its bad points. There are still certain functions that you may need Firefox for, but I’m now able to do the majority of my day to day SEO work in Chrome, here are the essential extensions and plug-ins required to get the best out of Chrome for SEO. Read more…
I attended London fashion Weekend on Saturday, it is my first year of attendance and from now on I will be going without a doubt every season.
London Fashion Weekend follows on straight from London Fashion Week, which is only open to people within the Fashion industry and is not only difficult but near impossible to acquire tickets to the fashion shows, with the likes of Bora Aksu, Erdem and Basso & Brooke showing their collections to name just a few.
Coming from a PPC background, it was quite interesting to see what was happening on the other side of the digital spectrum, at SES on Wednesday. While most of the SEO technical aspects were quite new to me, I did come away with an interesting thought, which I think applies equally to SEO and PPC (and perhaps all other forms of digital marketing); evolution, change and adaptability. And before anyone thinks that I stumbled into a Darwin Expo, here’s what Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer from Google had to say.
Google is evolving. Ever since Google has started unleashing new products (involving search) like One Box results, local business listings,universal search across all verticals; image results, real-time results, news results, video and many others, organic results are slipping to a lower position on the first page of search results. However, Maile was keen to mention that Google looks at SEO as a partnership.
Universal Search for a highly commercial keyword 'flowers'
A key part of SEO is to evolve with Google. This could include optimising local results on Google maps, including images and videos on the website or having a social media strategy, amongst others. Infact a very important blog post written way back in 2007 by Kevin Newcomb, Search Engine Watch, highlights this integrated aspect of SEO.
All this might seem like a lot to do, but Julian Sambles, Head of Audience Development, Telegraph, is of the opinion that it is easier to wait and see how the audience (users) react to the new landscape on SERPs before implementing new strategies. It is afterall the users who have to evolve and adapt to the huge amount of information being made available to them in such varied and rapidly changing forms.
Each search result is likely to be relevant to the user query, thus improving user experience and it is important for agencies to measure impacts of the new landscape on CTR of PPC ads and organic results. Afterall, paid search has also come a long way from static ads to ‘The Rise of Universal Paid Search’.
My main point is this; It’s important to accept that the search engines we’re all so reliant upon will change and evolve at a rapid rate (look at the amount of major changes in search alone over the last decade). Google in particular has released a whole host of new features recently, in a bid to safeguard its market share from competition. Some of these developments impact certain digital channels more than others. Ultimately, clients and their agencies need to have an integrated strategy so that the impact of search engine evolution is limited. Don’t place all your eggs (traffic) in one basket!
I recently been noticing some new menu options on Google.com - these don’t appear to be visible to everyone or on other regional Google(s). So for a search for ‘ipod speakers‘ you are presented with a search results page (SERP) like:
Down the left hand side you will see there are now options to filter the search results to have fewer or more shopping sites.
This filter alters what types of sites are listed and also how (and what) Universal results are positioned amongst the Web listing.
For example when you are researching into a product/holiday/etc you may want fewer shopping results and more informational sites and so you can filter to have fewer shopping sites such as:
On Tuesday, I ventured to Angel for the SES London conference and caught an inspiring debate amongst the top SEOs and SEMs in the industry. These included Rand Fishkin, Dave Naylor and Ralph Tegtmeier fighting for SEO and Paul Mead and Andrew Goodman for PPC. It was great to hear their take on the industry and where it is heading as well as a debate over the strengths and weaknesses of both PPC and SEO.
The session was kicked off by looking at the top line statistics comparing PPC and SEO, PPC wins out right!:) PPC had a slightly higher conversion rate, average order value, value per visit and average time on site. Please note though these stats do not take into account if SEO was involved within the users click journey.
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.
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