Fuse Optimisation

How does Google search the whole web in half a second

2012-04-24T11:26:00.000+01:00

Matt Cutts gives a quick 7 minute overview of the entire indexing to search results process.

iVan's new video is an act of God!

2012-02-29T16:31:00.000+00:00

Filmed with the aid of the free iPhone App Action Movie FX for iVan who provide cheap van insurance for tradesmen and commercial fleets.

SEO vacancy advertised in a robots.txt file

2012-01-04T12:36:00.002+00:00

Where better to put a job advert for an SEO position?

The SEO Rapper

2011-12-28T12:11:00.003+00:00

The SEO Rapper teaches us how good design improves rankings and consequently conversions.

Did you ever imagine you'd hear the lines

"do your layout with divs make sure that it's aligned
please don't use tables even though they work fine"

"when you use CSS, you page will load quicker
client satisfied like they eating on a snicker"

in a rap song? If you enjoy absorbing SEO information through the format of rap then you can also try his other masterpiece Pagerank or perhaps his battle with the PPC MC

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The 'Reasonable Surfer' patent

2011-12-15T13:28:00.002+00:00

Google's recent patent, dubbed the 'Reasonable Surfer' is making the SEO community re-evaluate the way internal and external linking is carried out on a site.

For more information see SEO by the Sea and SearchEngineLand

insurethebox on YouTube

2011-11-29T11:09:00.003+00:00

Optimising for the most popular video platforms on the web is more about social networking rather than traditional SEO. YouTube, Vimeo and Daily Motion have the largest share of this market with 82%, 9% and 4% respectively.

I'll be using insurethebox's videos to illustrate where improvements can be made and where the optimisation is working well.

insurethebox | Fitting the Box

The first things to consider are the standard SEO factors of title, description and tags. insurethebox are a car insurance company selling a more hi-tech type of insurance policy which involves fitting a telematics box in each car which through the use of GPS and accelerometers can record how far you drive and how well you drive. The title in this case should read something along the lines of

"insurethebox car insurance | Fitting the Box"

The description should ideally be 2 or 3 sentences, roughly 20 words and the tags should include somewhere between 5 to 10 words.

insurethebox | Fitting the Box

After title, description and tags, the next most important aspect of ranking well on YouTube involves all of the social media factors such as likes/dislikes, views, shares, subscribers, embeds and comments. This video has 13 comments and nearly 9,000 views which will help with the rankings on YouTube and also in the Google search engine.

insurethebox | Miles

This video has no description or tags, but does have 3 likes and nearly 7,000 views. With a more optimised title and added description tags, it would probably become the company's most popular video on YouTube.

Driver of the Year 2011 at Rockingham | insurethebox

This video, despite being the most visually exciting that insurethebox have posted on YouTube, only has 240 views, however overall their YouTube channel has approaching 30,000 views across all the videos which means using YouTube they have reached out to a large number of potential customers.

Over the next few weeks Fuse will be working on the video optimisation to see how we can further promote and improve the optimisation on these videos and future videos in the pipeline. We'll keep you updated.

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Google's Webspam Team is Run by Stick Men

2011-11-29T09:15:00.004+00:00

Matt Cutts asked his followers on Google+ to suggest what he should wear for his halloween costume. One follower suggested the black hat stick man from xkcd.

Google Analytics in Real Time

2011-11-16T15:57:00.001+00:00

How can you not be impressed with Google's real time analytics

A truly staggering free offering from Google

Google algorithm update affects 35% or websites

2011-11-07T10:47:00.000+00:00

Google announced "a significant improvement" to their ranking algorithm at the weekend. They predict the change will affect 35% of websites. The aim of this latest change, currently known as Google Freshness,' is to determine when to serve up 'fresh' search results for users who are looking for information on hot topics or recent events and when to present older results where they are more relevant to the users search query.

The change appears to give more weight to pages with recent timestamps. This means website owners would be well advised to re-visit the frequency of blog posts and how rss feeds are syndicated.

For more information watch Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz discussing the change with Mike King from iPullRank.

Analyse followers using FollowerWonk

2011-11-03T13:14:00.001+00:00

FollowerWonk allows you to analyse twitter accounts and extract data about any account's followers, to see which user or which user's tweets are the most influential or reach the widest audience.

The 'Analzye Followers' tool can be used to track your own twitter account or your competitors accounts. The data is presented in a pie chart showing a variety of stats including how many tweets an account's followers have made,

or how recent their last tweet was.

The 'Search bios' tool allows you to quickly find twitter accounts by specific keywords in their bios.

If you allow FollowerWonk access to your account you can use the follow button next to each user's account.

Google hide keyword data for search but not Adwords

2011-11-01T09:18:00.001+00:00

If a user is logged in to their Google account, performs a search and then clicks on your website in the organic search listings, the keyword or phrase they used will no longer show up in Google Analytics. But if a user clicks on an advert, the keyword/phrase is still being passed to Adwords.

Logged-in searches will now use the https protocol which makes search for secure but is going to make it difficult for website owners to distinguish between the different types of visitors to their sites, for example they will no longer be able to tell which users searched for their brand name and which found their site looking for a category of product or piece of information.

Read more on the Google Analytics Blog here

Google buys restaurant, hotel and shopping review site Zagat

2011-09-12T17:25:00.001+01:00

Zagat Guides, orignally a publisher of printed pocket restaurant and hotel guides for over 100 cities worldwide, has been bought by Google. The quality of the reviews and ratings on Zagat means Google will no longer have to scrape reviews from other sites such as Yelp.

When the data is integrated into Google Local search, Google will be able to provide the best restaurant, hotel and shopping recommendations and reviews in the industry.

Marissa Mayer, vice president of Google Maps and Location services, praises Zagat on the Official Google Blog. "Zagat provides people with a democratized, authentic and comprehensive view of where to eat, drink, stay, shop and play worldwide based on millions of reviews and ratings.

"For all of these reasons, I'm incredibly excited to collaborate with Zagat to bring the power of Google search and Google Maps to their products and users, and to bring their innovation, trusted reputation and wealth of experience to our users."

Greenpeace fights VW on Facebook

2011-09-08T13:09:00.001+01:00

Greenpeace started a campaign today to turn Volkswagen away from it's "dark lobbying practices" against climate change reform.

Facebook users are being encouraged to visit VW facebook pages from around the world and register their protest.

SEO Periodic Table

2011-08-24T11:21:00.003+01:00

I'm a huge fan of Dmitri Mendeleev the Russion chemist, inventor and creator of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements.

Sso when I saw Search Engine Land's SEO Periodic Table, I couldn't fail to be impressed with the way, like Meddeleev's table, it simplifies and unites a wide range of complicated factors in an easy to understand graphical form.

Visit the article on Search Engine Land's website to read more.

Angry Birds added to Google Plus

2011-08-15T11:40:00.001+01:00

This weekend saw Google's competition with Facebook step up a notch with the addition of games to Google+.

Opening the games tab displays the first 16 games available on Google+. Below the games you can find a 'Games Stream' which keeps you up to date with what you and your friends have been playing, achievements earned and other information provided by each game manufacturer.

Visit the Google+ Project to find out more about Google Plus

Google Plus for Business.

2011-07-22T12:03:00.000+01:00

Google Plus for businesses is due to be launched in the next few months according to Christian Oestlien the Google+ project manager.

In the meantime businesses are encouraged not to create accounts as private individuals. Google has been removing accounts for businesses as they breach the terms of Google Plus.

How Twitter tracked the News of the World scandal

2011-07-13T15:11:00.000+01:00

The Guardian analysed half a million tweets sent with a hashtag of #notw throughout the crisis. Click here to watch the frenzy unfold.

The Pope concedes that Facebook is a more important social network than the Catholic Church

2011-06-29T10:01:00.003+01:00

The Pope used an iPad to send his first tweet yesterday.

His Holiness also conceded that the Catholic Church is no longer the most important social network in the world in the description of their new Facebook app, Pope2You.

"Pope2You for Facebook lets you receive the messages of Pope Benedict XVI through the most important social network of the world. So you can meet the Pope on Facebook, listen to his words, see his pictures, receive his messages of congratulations through “virtual postcards”. The postcards can be sent to your “friends” on Facebook and the application can be shared with anyone."

Pope2You also includes a YouTube channel and an iPhone app.

3 ideas for optimising landing pages

2011-06-28T17:23:00.005+01:00

Using Eye Contact

We've known for a long time through trial and error that images of faces capture customers attention, especially if they are making eye contact.

But did you know that you can also use faces to guide people to important content, headings and calls to action. Read this blog post written by James Breeze from UsableWorld.

Usability testing of 106 people illustrates that not only will customers focus on a human face, but they will also look at what the person in the ad is looking at.

Testimonials

Using testimonials on landing pages immediately generates trust with visitors to a website and can be incredibly effective in converting visitors into paying customers.

Assurances

If your site has accreditations or is a member of a professional organisation, place 'trust icons' as close to your call to action as possible. A quick search for "London Plumber" found a site which illustrates this point well.

This has been proven to work with security certificates, credit card logos and industry awards.

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Google's new voice search

2011-06-15T16:41:00.000+01:00

Google has released Voice search for desktop PCs. All you need is Google Chrome 11 or higher and microphone. Voice search can speed up the time it takes to find what you're looking for, especially if your search term is long such as "Magento developers and search engine optimisation in West Sussex" and your typing speed is slow.

Voice search also has an advantage when you're struggling over the spelling of crepuscule or sesquipedalian. It may also be helpful when your hands are otherwise occupied such as cooking or knitting!

If search by voice is not appropriate perhaps the new search by image feature will help. Simply drag an image from a webpage or the desktop into the search box and Google will do the rest

Yahoo, Bing and Google join up for new search project

2011-06-07T10:41:00.001+01:00

The three search giants have joined hands and launched a new project called schema.org.

Schema.org explains that "many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data.

Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web.

Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure."

Specific schemas have been developed and documented for many different types of data such as books, movies, TV programmes, local businesses, restaurants and general products. There are also embedded 'non-text' objects for audio, video and images.

Inside Search - New blog launched by Google

2011-05-19T14:34:00.001+01:00

The new Google blog Inside Search has been launched today.

Google describes the subject matter of the blog as a place where "you’ll find regular updates on our algorithms and features, as well as stories from the people who work to improve Google every day."

The new blog will take the place of This Week in Search as users prefer updates as they happen rather than a weekly summary.

Google Reading Level

2011-05-16T17:19:00.005+01:00

Google have added a new feature to their search results to help users find web pages suitable for their reading level.

In the left-hand menu find "All Results" and click on "More search tools"

You will see the new tools marked "Dictionary" and "Reading level" Dictionary replaces the old "Define:" command which was used for quickly looking up a dictionary definition.

Reading level however is totally new. Google describes what it can be used for in their help files.

"Sometimes you may want to limit your search results to a specific reading level. For instance, a junior high school teacher looking for content for her students or a second-language learner might want web pages written at a basic reading level. A scientist searching for the latest findings from the experts may want to limit results to those at advanced reading levels."

A few quick tests bring up some interesting results. When searching for the phrase "UK newspaper news," the top two newspapers requiring a basic reading ability are The Sun and The Times, spot on!

The number one spot for the newspaper requiring an intermediate reading ability is The Independent.

I can't help feeling that webmasters will be testing their sites against competitors to see in which category Google has placed their site.

Using Reading Level with the Google "site:" operator

If you use a search such as site:http://www.fuseo.co.uk you can get an overall Google Reading Level score for an entire site. Here is what Google thinks of the Fuse site.

Interestingly when you click to view the basic pages, there is only one. A news story about a gadget called an IdeaPad from the Chinese company Lenovo.

A few experiments seem to suggest that Google has definately got it right. Consider this site search of the CBeebies site, the young childrens (under 5's) section of the BBC website.

And finally, the other end of the spectrum. This is a site search of the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University.

Will Google Reading Level have any affect on the SEO industry

We now know that Google has recorded the reading level of every websiste indexed. It follows that it will also have an idea of the general reading level of all sites in a particular industry or niche. With data such as this Google could use it in a number of ways. For example, sites in the middle of the 'bell curve' of reading level may be favoured above those at the extremities. Or perhaps the reading level of search phrases may be used to match the person searching to the right level of website.

Fuse relaunch the YouClaim personal injury website

2011-05-06T12:14:00.000+01:00

Fuse are proud to announce the relaunch of the YouClaim website.

YouClaim are the leading online compensation claim website dealing with personal injuries such as whiplash, accidents at work, asbestos claims, car accident compensation and all other types of no win, no fee claims.

With a good customer experience as the main focus, Fuse have been able to present the huge wealth of information available on the site in a way which no longer overwhelms visitors.

Fuse designed and developed the website in 2002 and have been managing the SEO campaign right from the start. Many of YouClaim's key search phrases have been at the number one spot in Google for over 5 years so it has been crucial to maintain the SEO integrity of the site.

Careful analysis and optimisation of the site structure, incoming links, 301 redirects, seo friendly expanding 'divs', optimised images and cleaner code should all help the site maintain the high search engine rankings that it currently enjoys.

The compensation calculator has been rebuilt in 3DMax and displayed using Adobe Flash, bringing it up to date and reflecting the new site colours and design. (see left)

The initial signs for the site are good, page load times are below 1 second (0.7s at the last test) and Fuse will continue to monitor bounce rates, average time on site and pages per visit to ensure everything is running smoothly.

Google +1

2011-04-20T11:26:00.004+01:00

Google are trialling their version of a Digg or a Facebook 'like' +1 is Google's attempt to break into the social bookmarking sector. In the trial, each website in the search results has a +1 button next to it and each time a user searches for a particular product, the results will indicate not only sites that the user has +1'd themselves but also sites which have been +1'd by friends in their (Google) social network, i.e. contacts from Gmail, Google Talk and Buzz.

The increase in popularity of social media has forced Google to use some of its metrics such as diggs, likes, tweets and retweets in their search algorithms. The use of these metrics allows Google to deliver search results for events as they happen, something they have been criticised for in the past, particularly after Michael Jackson's death when Twitter became the only site for users to turn to for the laterst information online.

Google now has all the pieces needed for a social network (Google profiles, Gmail, Buzz, Google Talk, +1, Android and an app store) but still nothing to link them all together.

Google have stated that +1 will not be used as part of the search algorithm at launch but it is something they will be starting to look at.

We’ll also start to look at +1’s as one of the many signals we use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, including social signals from other services. For +1's, as with any new ranking signal, we'll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality over time.

See the Webmaster Central Blog for more information
Opt in to +1 here
You will be able to add a +1 button to your site here