Today sees the highly secretive Google Press Event taking place at San Francisco’s Museum Of Modern Art with a number of Google A and B listers in attendance.

• Marissa Mayer, VP, Search Products & User Experience
• Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management
• Ben Gomes, Distinguished Engineer
• Othar Hansson, Senior Staff Software Engineer

There are a number of rumours floating round at the moment however heres my take on what may be announced

Google streaming results
I have heard this from a number of reasonable sources that this is due to be launched imminently so I would be hugely surprised if this wasn’t on the list later. There are increasing numbers of people suggesting they are seeing these results in the wild – which is always a reasonably good sign of potential wider rollout.

Further to this the fact Marissa Meyer is on the panel in particular would suggest some reference to a user centric announcement.

AJAX Results
Something Google have been playing around with for a while – and something I feel we are going to see whether we like it or not. Further to aspects from the above suggetion I can’t help thinking one would be rolled out in collaboration with the other.

Further Microformats support
Given that Othar Hansson is on the panel – this is a bit of a punt based on that alone – however given the focus Google has placed on incorporating Microformats into their framework – one I think that could have some backing

Long shots

• Further Google Social Announcements – Google.me
• Google Travel Developments
• Google expanded results – Further to Andy Beards observations over the weekend

There was an interesting conversation that came to light during one of the SEO Dojo conversations during the early part of Saturday morning over at the Think Vis conference in Leeds. Andy Beard was talking about how he was being shown 20 results rather than 10, something it would appear that Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land is seeing as well.

I would highly recommend reading Andy’s post in particularly as it very graphically highlights the scale of the current test, both on traditional search results and those results which have been the changed as a result of the recent ‘Pseudo Site Search updates’.

Source: Andy Beard

Its interesting that Google should be rolling out such a test, one of many which have been rolling out during recent weeks. Further to this, the continuing cannabalisation of traditional organic real estate by blended search and premium paid search inventory makes this even a more interesting development particularly if you take some points into consideration (from 2007 Comscore report – probably something more recent about)

• The average performs 84 searches per month
• The average number of search results pages per search is 1.33 (Down from 1.40 a year earlier
• Further to this – other studies have highlighted the considerable drop off as you move further down the page – in particular between page fold and beneath.
• The net result is that people would rather refine a query than look deeper into the results

Now take these latest changes into account. Google now offers a longer resultset to users. This is likely to have a number of impacts

• SEO’s have a greater number of premium (first page) results to go for, this may pacify SEO’s short term particularly given recent changes to the results
• People less likely to go onto second page
• The number of searches could go either way, as even in the current climate, people dont really like to scroll – however that said the greater number of results may encourage them to do so
• Paid search real estate is significantly increased beyond the current 8 or so adverts which are displayed.

My personal feel is that this has probably as much to do with the final point as it does the three above. Lets face it, Google is a commercial entity, no matter what they say about ‘Do no evil’ etc – and has one function and that is to make a profit. Much of the recent changes in particular the ‘Premium Sponsored Listings‘  are aimed at making more and more money – let alone the plans they have for expansion – ie real estate, social media and in all likelihood travel.

More space == More inventory == More opportunity for sales == More Revenue. Its not a difficult equation.

One of the talks which got a fair bit of coverage from ThinkVis on Saturday was this one by Karyn Fleeting from Tinderbox Media. Not being a day to day SEO its always good getting another perspective (albeit one closely aligned with SEO). Karen’s talk was a bit of a move away from traditional day to day SEO conversations however I wouldcertainly advise reading it if you get a chance

Apart from gaining a fascinating insight into her work – there are a number of great tips to the presentation including how to write a great press release as well as some links to some great resources.

Thanks to Karyn I have included the full presentation below

Link Building in Real Life – Think Visibility 04-09-10

Lisa starts by saying that the currency of the webs is no longer links but also takes into account social media. SEO has changed a lot in recent years including

• Incoing links are judged more strictly, big crackdown on paid links (personally don’t 100% agree with
• SEO’s have had to take into account social media channels into account
• Social media + SEO help spread the word – its not all about twitter / facebook they’re just TOOLS! its about grouped ideas

Before you start – understand – whos your target audience, what are their age, gender, location. Put yourself in their shoes – what problem are they trying to sound, how do they find what they want

Linkbaiting here comes into vogue. Create a piece of content that specifically increases chances of increasing organic links. Spread the word – no point doing it without doing this. The creative concept is fundamental for success here. Once you have this – find the linkerati – the people that are going to help you get the links. Be smart about finding them and remember they are not stupid. These people are usually

• Bloggers
• Tweet peeps -her words not mine
• Networkers

Host your content – don’t host it elsewhere , not via third party. Creating a link on an external domain obviously takes the link element out of it thus does not have an SEO benefit.

Integration is crucial – Make sure all components work together. Things have to be easy otherwise people won’t spread it. If its not easy people wont use it – something I think people often dont consider from a social perspective  -however they would do on aspects like conversion optimision.

Give something back – why should they link to you. Content? Discount? Breaking News? Free “something”.

I will try and get Lisa’s slide deck for later to talk through the examples – in particular I would draw your attention to the Yale Locks slides.

First serious panel at the day with Gary Taylor (a Think Visibility speaking virgin) – covering a number of aspects to keyword domains and mini-sites. Gary is a domainer – who buys, sells and developers domain names.

His first slides covering the basics of keyword domains, namely

• Exact Match is essential
• Localised domains can often help in localisation – particularly if you have a domain which is a key traffic driver within a particular vertical

Mini-sites as the name suggest are just that – small websites – consisting of between 1-10 pages. With these sites be very keyword specific don’t get carried with lots of SEO work – but focus specifically on those terms with only a very variations. Gary highlights the fact that time is money – the longer you are willing to hold on to a domain – the more valuable they are likely to become. Self sustaining here is crucial – both on and off-page.

A quote from Rich Schartz (Ricksblog.com – a well known domainer) is

“…know the difference between investment-quality domains and domains that mean nothing, say nothing have no idea behind it, no traffic within it, no idea how to make money with it and nobody wants to buy… what i refer to as pigeon shit…. pigeon shit with an extention

Key to your domain decision should be

• Exact Match
• CPC and Promotional opportunities (at the very least do some research on search based keyword tool to see what market is there

Its interesting here that Gary highlights how a scalable model can quickly become a good revenue earner. 3-5 per week per domain based on ten domains is going to give you around £2600 in revenue.  Start however by covering costs. Monetise your domain by using a variety of sources:

• Amazon E-Store Widgets
• Adsense
• Affiliates

Would suggest reading Gary’s post on his experiences with flyfishingbooks.com – http://bit.ly/d6d5cy

Considerations:

• Dominating a niche
• Lead Generation
• Diversify
• Hand Registration vs Auctions
• Long Tail vs Generic
• Network of related sites vs one-off sites.

Gary has a number of resources which should be read

• Rick Schartz
• Frank Schilling (highly recommended reading)
• Kevin Ham (reinvent.com – worth looking at owns the most domains out of anyone, makes $70m a year)
• Gary Kremen (originally owned match.com and still owns sex.com – currently available for auction

If you are looking for auction sites suggested ones are:

• Sedo.com
• Domainlore.co.uk (currently in beta)
• Greatdomains.com
• Afternic.com

Domaining tools resources:

• DomainTOols.com
• Valuate.com
• Estibot.com

Parking and Drop Catching – gary suggests doing this if you arent going to use it. At least allows some authority going to be gained.

• Whypark.com
• Pool.com

Forums/Resources:

• Acorndomains.co.uk
• Domaining.com

Q & A

Hyphenated domains – Gary not keen on hyphenated domains. Resale value of hyphenated domain is significantly lower than non-hyphenated domains

Domains – Gary suggests .org.uk still valuable – if you can’t get a .co.uk. .Org he favours over.net. From a personal perspective here have to agree as from the affiliate sites I work on

Selling domains – Thinks agencies have an opportunity here. Thinks domainers should contact agencies if they are looking to sell. Also highlights that .com is far more valuable than .orgs. End Users often pay less for domains than domainers do.

Leasing domains – From personal perspective think there is huge opportunity here for domainers – something Gary has just reitterated.  Beneficial for both parties at the end of the day

Trademarks – Suggests stay away from trademarks. Approaching a whole world of trouble. However clever long tail targeting is useful

Content – A site has got to have decent content in order for this to work. Crap content is not likely to be rewarded. Again completely agree here – some automation does work – but needs unique content alongside it.

Whois If you have a content network of domains this may be a consideration.

Bubble Bursting – Gary thinks this is already happening.

For the first time I have attended Dom Hodgson’s Think Visibility conference over in Leeds. Despite the fact I am one of the founders of Sascon over here in Manchester, I always like to get behind other North West ventures – and Dom’s conference is one of the better ones around.

Following a brief introduction from Dom – which introduced all of us to the conference. Mel Carson introduced us to Bing’s Learning and Earning with Social Media

He starts off by introducing some great examples of Social Media in action. Bartells Drug Store in particularly will be happy to hear that Mel did indeed keep his promise to start his next presentation with an example of good search and social media in action.

This leads him in to how Microsoft have approached the path to social media. According to Mel much of this started around five years ago, with the launch of blogs and forums back in 2006 – which allowd Microsoft to have a forum where

• They could have an official voice
• Calling Card
• Ask For Feedback
• Feature Requests – talks through the fact that its all about listening
• Signing up Beta Testing
• Help Advertisers – some people dont want help  they just want the tools to develop things themselves

Further to this Microsoft actively understood the requirement for advocacy. In particular the use of 3rd parties has been embraced by the use of sites such as Sphinn. Twitter as well has played an important part in this evolution (Mel here thanks David Naylor for gettig him into Twitter) – with Microsoft now running two accounts (was previously 3). They monitor these accounts in a daily basis as a tool to help support and promote the Microsoft product. Further to this other channels such as Facebook – also allow greater awareness of their toolset. The benefit for them is the accountability with Microsoft able to determine a number of tangible metrics to ai them.

Other channels Microsoft have utilised increasingly as part of their social media strategy include:

• Youtube
• Flickr
• Windows Live

All allow greater touch points to the community which people can use to communicate with Microsoft. Mel also continues to suggest traditional channels such as PR are a crucial part of the communications strategy – and one that appears to becoming increasingly integrated – something I personal believe is crucial – and so often underutilised by organisations

Whilst having all this content out this is important, understanding and reporting is just as important. IN particular discipline n report is crucial.  Looking at his slides their active use of Buzzmetrics allows them to listen and understand not just how much is being said but sentiment as well – as well as allowing them to respond to individual contacts themselves.

A showreel highlights the fact that events often allow them to attract new followers and visitors. Looking at the slides he is showing he highlights how a myriad of technologies allows them  to support and promote their content in a format that they want – and gives people a really good indication of what they want.

He finally highlights 7 value indicators:

• Measure growth and translate as reach
• Think how you’re lowering costs
• Information and Empowerment leads to increased spend
• Internal education leads to external evangelism
• “Earned Media” – Windows 7 Launch (221M Impressions)
• Think “Social Media Marketing” – Be disciplined
• Whats the return on in-action (what would the difference be if you didnt get into social media)

All of us have been there, sitting in front of a client who wants world domination – or indeed wanting to be the client who wants world domination. However dominating something, whether it be a singular keyword or an entire sector is not easily done – and takes a lot of time, work and meticulous planning.

Search itself is an interesting sector. Many organisations struggle to get a foothold within organic results, relying on secondary channels such as Affiliates, Paid Search and more recently Social Media. This is especially evident in sectors such as Gaming – where returns are often high, markets heavily competitive and the sector itself highly mature.

It is roughly possible to break organisations within search down into four rough groups, which I have provisionally named:

• Sector Specialists
• Keyword Kings
• Long Tail Leaders
• Non-Starters

The groups above could be differentiated based on

• Content developed – Assumed here is obviously a well thought out information architecture and clear differentiation of unique content
• Links acquired – Again assumed that clear strategy to link acquisition – with some focus on the acquisition of semantically relevant links to the site.

Further to this I broke this down into the four distinct groups outlined above, which could be described further as follows:

Sector Specialists

Examples: MoneySupermarket (UK)

There aren’t many examples of organisations out in the wild, however Moneysupermarket could be described as one such example. Dominant across a number of heavily competitive generic and long tail queries across the finance sector including home insurance (and until recently car insurance), secured loans and a number of utility centric terms.

When you go into Moneysupermarket you get a feeling for why. Its one of the most search centric of organisations I have come across, with a number of the functions heavily feeding into their organic search, something which I hate to say a lot of clients do not do effectively. That aside, that visibility has been built up by extensive link acquisition targeting a variation of their targeted terms – and extensive on-page content content development (at last count 90,100 and counting).

This isn’t something that can be recreated overnight – in fact I would argue that any site starting out   now may find that job nigh on impossible to recreate it.

Keyword Kings

Examples: Admiral (currently no.1 car insurance)

Keyword Kings are often sites that heavily focus in particular areas – one particular trait here can often be seen in their keyword profiles. Keyword kings are often much more heavily offpage dependant – relying less on the day to day content development.

More attainable than achieving sector specialism merely because the lack of dillution allows for much greater traction – however the effect of much of this is that the effect of this often varies significantly from vertical to vertical.

I would suggest this is where you will find many of the high end organisations targeting particularly in areas such as insurance, or gaming where you can often find ‘jackpot terms’ driving a vast majority of the traffic to the sites.

Long tail leader

Examples: Too many – Marmaris Holidays would be an example though

For many sites starting off, this is often the way to make some initial wins before taking on much loftier targets. For larger sites however, who can rely on much greater site authority, this can often be a good way to mop up smaller volumes of targets.

Given the lesser volumes of active competitors, there are still a number of long tail terms which can be actively achieved without any significant direct link acquisition and by just a degree of on-page optimisation.

Cheap flights is an example of a site which has attacked these long tails very effectively, from destination led search terms to source led search terms, they have gone after many of these via extensive content supported by a very cohesive internal architecture framework..

One shouldn’t at this point forget the important role that internal navigation can play. If you can’t at the end of the day provide the search engines with a clear indication of what you consider authority pages, then why should Google presume that?

Non-starters

Exactly as it sounds, and as the graph suggests comes down to organisations/sites who do not develop any content strategy or acquire any links. Doing so is unlikely to see you generate any significant traffic or visibility to the site – and as a result little direct ROI atributable back to organic activity.

Such sites will often require significant support via paid search in particular – however other channels may also come into vogue where required. Thats not to say such sites can’t be succesful – one however probably shouldn’t factor organic search into play as a major factor.

Conclusion

Search engine optimisation is an interesting channel – however there is no doubting things are very different from the days when I started out (strangely talking to the likes of Rand Fishkin in the Cre8asite forums) – with campaigns now bringing together a wide variety of on and off-page techniques as well as external channels such as PR and Video in many cases.

As such simply standing still and hoping for the best is not enough. A search engine optimised site is simply not enough and needs to be supported by either further extensive on-page content or via off-page activity – where aggression is often determined by competitiveness and the competition itself.

As part of the ongoing guest bloggers series on Holistic Search, Rob Weatherhead – Operations Director at Latitude Express explores how transparency within the search marketing sector is key to ongoing success

The market for agencies offering search engine marketing over the few years has become increasingly cluttered. Many moons ago when I started on the search marketing career ladder there was very little competition and the number of serious search marketing agencies could be counted on one hand. Since then the market has changed significantly with web developers, hosting companies, media agencies and a growing lists of specialists all competing for the UK’s search marketing budgets. It sometimes seems like each time you speak to a prospect you are faced with a new competitor, somebody you have never come across before, and the list continues to grow.

With this increased competition comes the inevitable focus on price and the margins available for search marketing agencies have been significantly squeezed as competition has increased. Clients have started negotiating harder, and the dreaded procurement team are now a regular participant in the pitch process. On top of this, increased competition puts a natural pressure on agencies to lower or discount their fees in order to secure business.

In this situation I have seen a lot of agencies reducing their fees, sometimes to ridiculous levels, just to win some new business. This approach however does nothing but devalue the services being provided, not just for the agency in question, but the whole market. It also puts the eventual winner of business (assuming they went lowest) at risk once they have to actually deliver for such a low fee. I hate to think how many search contracts are out in the market which are loss making for the incumbent when the maths are done.

I’m pretty sure this trend cannot continue (at least I hope not!) and that competition, and market pricing, will level out. And whilst improved efficiencies, processes, and technology may mean agencies are able to offer services for less, this will not simply be done blindly in an attempt to win new business. But this will only come if the agencies learn that winning loss making business isn’t a long term strategy, and clients are educated and open to the value of the service provided.

Key to this transition is transparency and understanding. If agencies provide transparent pricing models which are built on logic and facts, allowing clients to understand exactly what they are getting for their money, then everybody will be better off. Clients understand more about what they have paid for, and just as importantly, what they haven’t. Whilst agencies can ensure that they are charging a fee for their services that they are comfortable with by providing a “menu” of services and associated costs, thus allowing the client to get more, but at an agreed rate.

And through this level of transparency and understanding you will also foster a greater relationship. Once everybody can see, and is comfortable with, what they are getting from a relationship then on the whole, they will be happier. Non transparent pricing with unclear deliverables are a thing of the past and have been the downfall of many a client relationship, the future is transparent, and the sooner agencies wise up to this fact the better it will be for everyone.

Rob Ousbey, from Distilled found this interesting test from Google where search results are updated on the fly. This is an interesting development as it could have a number of impacts on search behaviour. Interestingly, Rob Managed to pull together a video of it in action.

The following was observed as part of this latest test:

• Users results are updated as they type
• Users do not need to click on search to update their results
• Paid Search results update as well as organic
• Blended search results update as well as the other results

Perhaps the biggest impact on these latest tests could be on the following

1. Paid Search CTR. Just imagine, if this works as it looks as though it does. Every time I am typing my phrase in the results update. Every time the paid search result updates, this updates the PPC result. This could mean that my advert could get a significantly higher volume of impressions than it did previously which in turn could have an impact on the performance and accountability of the paid search ads. Let me put this into context. One of the factors which impacts Paid Search Quality Score, is click through rate. By increasing the potential impressions on non-relevant searches – particularly on phrase or broad heavy searches – the likelihood is the quality score may be impacted and thus advertisers may pay more for their ads as their quality score is lower than it would have been on previous incarnations or under the results page current guise.
2. Search behaviour. Much of the recent research tends to suggest users have been favouring longer tail searches particularly since Google introduced Google Suggest. With the results now impacting on the fly, users may again start to favour much shorter tail terms for entry into the site, as they potentially find the results they want much earlier. Commercially again this may impact the paid search inventory more as much of these results are often more expensive in terms of CPC and thus likely to cost more to potential advertisers as a result.

From a usability perspective, I actually quite like the thought of it, however from an advertiser perspective, I can’t help thinking this could have some quite significant impacts, not least in terms of commercial accountability of the paid search results particularly on accounts where due diligence may not have been placed on the ongoing optimisation of the accounts, or where keyword matching may not have been particularly tight – I would suggest exact/phrase match phrases would be impacted far less.

This is still fairly limited in terms of its rollout however I will certainly be keeping a very close eye on this one

There have been some very interesting developments with regards to the expanded use of Google Places over the last couple of months, with Google not only increasing the usage of Google Places within their mainstream SERPs but also increasing the number of features within it such as Tags. Further to that – Google Places is POTENTIALLY such a great toolset to have within the Google armoury – HOWEVER that is being tainted by a number of issues at present including

• Lack of control
• Lack of support
• Lack of protection
• Time for verification

Further to the last point, this was something Lisa Myers blogged about over at SEO Chicks back in January, when one of her clients appeared to have been hijacked and she went through a lot of the pains I am now going through with one of mine in similar circumstances.

Similarly to Lisa, the client in my case operated within the Travel sector, and similarly to Lisa’s example the referenced listing was not owned by the organisation I was working with. In my case this happened to be an affiliate who had managed to get himself/herself associated with the listing. All well and good for the affiliate, not so good for the client.

The repatriation process has been long and painful, with Google themselves not at all able to help in any way – something you would have thought would have been a must do – given the fact this is increasingly looking like a revenue area for them – as demand in local search grows. However try and get something as simple as a rogue listing fixed is not ‘as simple as simply clicking a button’ and unfortunately should you be in a similar situation is likely to mean a long hard slog in order to return your listings to their correct state.

In particular the verification process needs some addressing. The mere fact that it is possible for an organisation to ‘hijack’ another organisations listing is beyond comprehension, whether this be by unscrupulous means on behalf of affiliates, or simply on behalf of incorrect association on behalf of Google it simply shouldnt be allowed to happen.  Let us revisit the example I mentioned earlier and highlight some of the issues

• Venue name correct
• Clicking on title takes you to affiliate site
• Clicking on reviews takes you through to a competitor site (first in the list)

The last point in itself is a concern without taking into account any of the aspects of the Google Places issues. Magnify that issue with the fact now that I have to wait two weeks to verify an account and the problem is increased significantly. I will at this point say the UK staff are generally as helpful as they can be in the circumstances, however the problem would appear to be down to processes within Google as a whole, if looking at the moderation of the Local listings is anything to go by

Looking at the above, Google obviously should have an insight into the fact that the entry in question may not belong to the affiliate site in question. As a result, and given that they moderate affiliate activity for other services such as Base, perhaps , no this should have been picked up earlier.

I will finish by saying, I think Places potentially is a great tool. However if we are to see any further integration of Places, Google needs to get behind it and provide it with the thought, and level of support it gives most of its other products (I would exclude Buzz and Wave off that ). Only then will we see a commercially viable and useful solution to integrate into localised campaigns

As part of the ongoing guest bloggers series on Holistic Search, James Grayson discusses role of link building on natural rankings

When meandering through the world of SEO’s ever changing landscape – I am the first to admit, it sometimes becomes easy to lose yourself in the rabbit holes of dis-information and pure SEO speculation. Cutting to the chase and getting one thing straight, this piece is a simple insight into the mind of me @idetcola a professional Google-er and established link builder.

Firstly, my SEO speculation… I come with a few preconceptions of Search Marketing even Digital Marketing, as I see these are two very different things yet both essential to the over goal in our mission, moreover recently I am picking up a shifting vibe in SEO. By this I refer to not only the people, places and budgets powering results, but the SERPs and their timely movements. Hence link building acquisition rates are now more important to your footprint than ever before.

Although I can appreciate world demographics and the recent couple of Google updates here, (the name of such may be a decent clue,) I would like you to take a ‘peak’ at the graph below….

This graph is an illustration of what was my conception of a pre update, ‘new’ websites link building acquisition rate and in turn this graph forms my starting point of a new website (in competitive niches) strategic link building campaign. Understandably the graph reminds us to build based on your competitions link flow… Bearing this in mind and moving into the modern age, I do still see sense and results from this strategy. However recently when moving around the la la, fairly uncompetitive (in terms of skilled anchor-text keyword link building) world of local level SEO and long-er tail SERPs. I now begin to see a sense of just how powerful; even how much ‘juice’ some anchor text links do presently appear to carry.

Enter the beast as we apply this strategy to the scary realm of the generic keyword vertical e.g. “Bingo”. Sometimes with backlinks and SEO, when you’ve built and built and built links — you need to just stop building links… for a while at least. After all you must let your link ‘juice’ catch up with your website — you’ve wound that website up so be sure you’re ready to stand back and let it go! And what with the SEO purse strings tightening there has never been a better time to hold still.

Some of you out there may find this a little odd, and some may wonder why I own a white label link building agency which recommends stopping building links, but it has to be said that over manipulation is perhaps one of the worse things we as optimisers can do, thus your targeted anchor text’s link acquisition rates, amongst other factors form the core elements to be adhered to when maintaining a natural link footprint successfully.

Although it is nonsensical to form a common backlink strategy for all SERP verticals and websites, as is the case with search marketing, it is very unique to the website and keywords involved. The point above simply reminds us to take quality over quantity when dealing in backlinks, we make the point… ’6 months online is just a drop in the ocean’ thus keeping your link acquisitions organic and natural in appearance can still assure you a position one over due time.

Some of you over the weekend may have seen the Conversion post regarding Google’s latest test with local search results. The post made particularly interesting reading as this highlighted a huge impact in terms of Google’s approach to local search results, and their usual blended search layout.

Source: converseon.com

In particular though it was the removal of any organic search results from the resultset that was the standout feature of the test, with traditional organic search results removed and replaced solely with the Google Places listings for the particular result. The query used was ‘car rental’ however I understand the results have been seen and trialled on ‘prescription glasses’ (from Gareth Hoyle – Manual Link Building) – and I would not be surprised if this got rolled out to include other local heavy sector such as:

• Hotels
• Holiday Rentals
• Taxis
• Car Rental (as highlighted above)
• Service industries – such as Electricians etc – where results are often heavily ‘aggregator’ heavy and locally referenced

The feedback from the industry thus far has been mixed. Many have said that this is not a good move from Google, whilst others have suggested this is just another move in Google’s quest for greater relevancy. I would however add a degree of scepticism to any feedback here – particularly since the launch of Google Places and the fact that Google are now looking to actively develop Google Places as a revenue earner in its own right (call me a skeptic )

It would however throw the cat amongst the pigeons and in my opinion can not be fully rolled out UNTIL Google have fixed the issues with the current Places infrastructure. In particular issues such as:

• Affiliate Squatting – Many affiliates have taken advantage of either inaccurate targeting on Googles part or active acquisition of Local results
• Awareness – Limited awareness of places at present – thus many organisations may miss the opportunity to compete here
• Support from Google – Google don’t actively support this here in the UK
• Account Migration – Many of these are often setup by agencies/third parties

Would be of immediate concern before undertaking any significant rollout of Local within the mainstream SERPs as highlighted above. Whilst I personally can see the benefit in a higher proportion of non-organic inventory on such pages, whether a full breakout of local results, is the right way to do this is open to debate.

As part of the ongoing guest post series on Holistic Search, Rhys Wynne compares the experiences of working at a small boutique country agency against that of working in a larger city based organisation

A few months ago I decided I had enough of living in North Wales & decided to up sticks & move to Manchester, I needed a change from my job at the time as head of SEO at a small web design agency, and managed to land myself in a position at a similar sized company based in Altrincham.

Even though by description they are both SEO & Web Design agencies and both are SME’s, there are some noticeable differences between working in a city & working in the country.

Less Competition (in general) in the Country
Working in North Wales I first of all managed to land myself a position in a company at the time that I probably wouldn’t have obtained if I applied in the city, there is a brain drain in most sectors in the country & for cutting edge fields such as IT, finding the right people can be tricky. This is something I was glad for when I was looking for work, but it was terrible when headhunting new staff – least of all my replacement when moving on! I did manage to build a team of competent SEO’s, with the help of a great support network, but it was tough (although I’ve yet to be involved in the recruitment process in the city, so it could be tough here as well).
Furthermore, for the majority of the SEO clients we managed we achieved remarkable results. The reason being is they were only targeting phrases in and around the area. With the exception of the tourism sector, a lot of page one rankings were achievable relatively quickly. Even traditional high value niches such as the financial & legal sectors were achieved with simple on page optimisation.

Less Work in the Country
Of course part of the reason that results were easy to come by was the fact that not every business had a web presence, and not every web presence was effectively optimised. Although this could lead to potentially a lot of work, unfortunately often convincing them to invest in a web site & a link building campaign varied from tricky to nigh on impossible. This was likely due to the area and the way they did business – in fact North Wales did have a number of schemes to boost the web presence of businesses with financial incentives.
Those who did decide to invest did see in general an upturn in business, and whilst it was tricky obtaining the work, retaining it month on month was straightforward as the client often saw a return by being the only optimised site within that industry in the area.

More Varied Work in The City
There were two types of clients I dealt with 80% of the time in my previous position:-

• Hotels
• Caravan Sites

Often in the country you have only one or two different industries which support large swathes of the population, and although it can be fun writing travel guides & tourist information content, it can be a bit monotonous if you do it all the time. Very few clients are in the same niche in my current position, so it helps me become more rounded with knowledge in a number of sectors. SEOs in my eyes make ideal quiz team members!

More Social Events & Access to Knowledge in the City
This was the deciding factor in moving. I had been to a couple of SEO events in Manchester (mainly the Manchester Seo events), and loved them tremendously. There was not as many in North Wales (indeed any!), and although I had attempted to start a North Wales Twestival, it hardly got off the ground (this was probably more my lack of enthusiasm rather than there not being a vibrant Twitter community, as there is). Seemingly every week there’s some sort of digital event happening in Manchester, so as a new face in the city, I am not short of things to do.
Likewise back in North Wales I felt I was a bit of a big fish in a little pond (actually it was more akin to a whale in a teardrop), in that there were very few people I could sit down with, discuss ideas & brainstorm with, without first of all explaining what SEO is and why you cannot just put “britney spears” over and over again in the meta keyword tag. Manchester on the other hand there are always people to talk to. Yes you can do this over MSN, Skype or Twitter no problem, but I’d much prefer doing it over a beer, wouldn’t you?

In Conclusion
Whilst I had a great time working in the country for an agency, I feel that moving to the city has helped my career tremendously. Getting to know some very talented SEOs, as well as the challenge & greater competition has helped me grow into a more competent SEO. With that said I know people who have moved the other way – obtained experience working in the city & applied it successfully to a country-based agency. The experience gained in both fields is invaluable, and whilst a lot of the work is the same, there are differences present in both.

As to which is better? I can’t say really. Both have their place in the industry, targeting different client bases. Of course other factors to consider are external factors such as family & friends should you wish to switch from a country agency to a city agency. Of course, if it’s not too much trouble, you can certainly try both & see which one you prefer.

Rhys Wynne is a SEO Consultant at Manual Link Building. Outside of his day job he posts his ramblings on SEO, Blogging & Social Media at The Gospel According to Rhys.

I was watching television over the course of the weekend and noticed the seemingly ongoing Bing adverts.

These were part of a multi-million pound advertising campaign by Bing – and further to those months of testing I revisited the market share data to see whether this has been effective.

These were the stats from March this year (from Hitwise/Experian data)

Rewind back five months and Bing were very much the third in line, sitting behind both Google and Yahoo, with just under 3% of the UK search marketing spend, estimated according to the IAB (as of March this year) to be worth around £2.15 Billion pounds (£2,000,000,000).

Now lets fas forward this to the end of July and take the latest data published by Experien which highlighted a significantly different picture, and one which would which sees, Bing now as the second largest search engine in the UK, however whether this is due to the continuing decline of Yahoo as a search player or the effect of the promotion Bing has undertaken, is open to debate.

I say significant but its not immediately apparent from the images above – however the following were interesting

1. Bing is now the second largest search engine in the UK – ahead of Yahoo (thats not really surprising) but still way behind Google
2. Bing has seen an increase of 0.16% market share – you may say thats not much but consider the size of the market
3. Yahoo has seen a drop of 2.91% with Google seeing a further 1.46% increase in market share
4. That would thus suggest any increase in market share has been at the expense of Yahoo rather than Google – which ultimately is going to hit revenues again given the Yahoo/Bing alliance.

This may not sound like much until we factor in the potential return of these increases. The figures released by the IAB were for the UK paid search spend of around £2.15 billion, which means every percent means around £20 million revenue to the search engines, so every percent does count have a significant impact in these instances as the table below highlights.

It would seem therefore that the amazing budget allocated for the Bing advertising campaign has not had a hugely significant impact – and would only really break even if they took the entire Yahoo budget into account. That said, it has continued to make gains into the search engine market share over the last year. My personal feelings is that I can’t help thinking Bing may be a little disappointed not to have more of an indent into the search marketing sector at this stage, particularly given the level of awareness.

One has to take into account the 100 odd million advertising budget deployed at the start of the campaign (albeit globally) and when you look at just an incremental return of just over £3 million pounds, one would suggest questions are going to be asked sooner or later.

Whether or not they can compete with the likes of Google is open to debate. When asked whether Bing were a viable alternative to Google, our readers suggested no.

During the last couple of years we have got used to Google testing a number of high income super competitive verticals such as secured loans and credit cards. This has come in a number of guises including a drop down box in the first position, first identified a couple of years ago and tested within ‘loans’ related terms

Google now appear to be reviewing this testing within the credit cards section – however in a format I have not seen before, but one I would suggest from a behavioural perspective is likely to see some significant traction

The most interesting thing from this – is that the ‘Google comparison ads’ has been inserted between the 3rd paid search ad, and the first organic result. Why is this interest – well take into account the perceived organic/paid search split + the fact that the final result has sitelinks (and sitelinks increasing uptake. Both would draw attention to the area where the ‘segregated’ paid slot now sits. Given the eyefall thus drawn to the area, this is likely to see a high volume of clicks drawn to the area.

The final landing page remains fairly similar to those used in earlier Merchant Search experiments, an whether or not this will make it out into more long term implementation is still open to debate – particularly given that the previous incarnations didn’t see stay around for long. However given this is slightly more subtle, you never know….

I always find it interesting when you come across bits like this – and in all likelihood this may have been round for a while however I thought it worth adding all the same.

During my browsing round today (I have no doubt this has been around for a while) I came across this feature from Google which allows you to view your Social Circle, often integrated into search results and shows areas where people in your circle may have recommended or reviewed a product.

Now with the above information in mind it was then interesting to come across this which highlighted two main features, namely

1. View your social circle
2. View your social content

Using the first option, you had the ability to view two options – those from Google assets (such as Buzz, Reader etc) and those from sources affiliated to your Profile such as Twitter, Friendfeed and the like. These are better descripbed by Google as follows

This is the network of connections Google uses to identify relevant social search results. It is based on a combination of the following:

• Direct connections from your Google chat buddies and contacts (18, 16 with content)
• Direct connections from links that appear on your Google profile (222)
• Secondary connections (3663) that are publicly associated with your direct connections

In addition to web pages from your social circle, posts from your Google Reader subscriptions may also appear in your social search results.

This is a recent snapshot of your social circle. Changes you make to your connections will be reflected in the next snapshot. Learn more »

The above image highlights those from my social circle – however should I decide to view those I know via sources via my profile in the main sources from Twitter. This provides a breakdown by both primary and secondary contacts

Google also provide an overview of where they pull their ‘sphere of influence’ in regards to the Social Circle – many of which will not be surprising given that these are provided within your profile.

Whilst I would suggest its not going to tell you anything you dont necessarily know already it was useful to gauge various people/web assets affiliations the profile is able to obtain. Further to this it does provide a more reflective overview of my sphere of influence and potentially in what context the ‘social circle results may be returned in’.

I am of the opinion this is increasingly something that Google will use within their results, given the increasing focus on social within their offerings. This would suggest a continuing blend of search and social – and one that may make many people align their social media and search marketing activity much as they would do with their paid search and SEO activity – an increasing case of Holistic Social Marketing rather than just Holistic Search Marketing.

If you would like to see your ‘Social Circle, click here

This is a a guest post from Kevin Strong aka Goosh from the ongoing “guest bloggers” series on Holistic Search

One of the biggest impacts to your online presence is your website being hacked – particularly if it’s earning you money. Depending on the severity of the hack it can have several affects on your presence, your brand and, ultimately, your reputation. Your search engine rankings can suffer, you could lose valuable visitors and potential business and in a variety of cases you could lose face in the online world – your own reputation being associated with the hack.

It’s all well and good checking your own website manually and feeling safe ‘cause your site looks exactly the same, but imagine if you were hacked and you didn’t even know about it? There have been several exploits to open source platforms including WordPress, PHPBB forums etc where a website is leveraged in the hackers favour for a variety of reasons:

• Creation of spammy pages which are then auto-tweeted from your own twitter account to your own follower list if you are using the popular TweetMeMe plugin.
• Links inserted in your highly authoritative pages using CSS to hide them.
• Your domain authority being abused to cloak your website to show content containing something completely unrelated but highly lucrative.

There are many more reasons for your site to be hacked without your knowledge, but by utilising some simple techniques you can ensure you that if your website succumbs to a hacking attempt you catch it early and rectify it.

Catch It Early
There are several things you can do to combat hacking attempts on your website. They start with the often recommended, but not often implemented, internet safety recommendations:

• Ensure your CMS & FTP passwords are complex and contain a mixture of upper and lowercase letters, a number and some symbols. (This is dependent on your provider’s capabilities of course).
• If your platform is open source ensure that it is updated to the latest version. That’s the primary reasons for the updates in the first place – to fix a security loophole.
• Regularly check user access and ensure your antivirus software is up to date on the machines you regularly update from.

Aside from these basic steps, you can utilise several free tools out there to check your website and its contents for signs of a successful hack.

Keyword Significance

Often not utilised as much as it should be, Google Webmaster Tools is a great source of information about your website and content.
The keyword significance feature shows you a huge list of keywords it deems your website to be about. Have a look through them regularly to see if you can spot any keywords that simply don’t belong.

Fetch as Googlebot
You can also utilise a great feature introduced in October 2009 called Fetch as Googlebot. This allows you to take a closer look at what Googlebot sees so you can spot any potential cloaking issues.

This can also be achieved with several Firefox toolbar addons (User Agent Switcher, SEOMoz’s MozBar etc).

Google Alerts
Following on from the GWMT’s keyword significance, you can also setup Google Alerts to let you know the moment your website starts containing any of the usual keywords associated with website hijacking all via a simple email.
An example alert could be: site:goosh.co.uk cialis|porn|viagra|casino|poker
On a side note, as of March 2010 Google Webmaster Tools will also send you an alert if it suspects hacking attempts:

Debugging the Extent of the Hack

Now you know your site has been hacked, it’s time to find out how, and more importantly, what is affected.

Date & Time Stamp Pages

Depending on how much access you have to your website you can give yourself a great way of knowing when the page was truly last updated even if your CMS currently tells you. By utilising your server-side language be it PHP, ASP, .net etc, you can add a commented out piece of code to your page showing the date and time of the last save date.

By looking at the source code of your pages you will be able to see code similar to the above. This is particularly useful if your website is hacked directly from its template and not on an individual page basis (e.g. WordPress) and can be used to pinpoint the date of the hack and cross checking against your server logs/access logs

Google Analytics
Unless you don’t live in Analytics like a lot of search marketers do, it is always a further fountain of knowledge to see if the website has been receiving traffic around the hacked keywords or through referral traffic from other hacked websites. It is often common for your website to be used as part of a cluster with many other websites in the hijack.

Fixing the Website Hack
Unfortunately this can vary depending on the size of the website, the platform it is built upon etc. But several things can be done to restrict and eradicate the threat.

User Access
My first port of call is to check user’s access etc. Are there any users with privileges they shouldn’t have? Promptly remove or restrict them in the CMS as this stops anyone exploiting the access being alerted to your attempt to fix the problem and thusly cutting the chances of them knowing any new information.

Password Changes
Change your hosting configuration password, your FTP password and your CMS access details (also checking the email addresses used).

Version Updates
Once that’s been cleared up you should update the platform version immediately. As mentioned earlier the hack could have been exploiting a previously public exploit.
Funnily enough, if you remember the steps to safeguard from hacks at the beginning of the post, then you will realise that the steps to fix are the same as the steps to prevent. Being cautious can save you a headache when you really don’t need one!

Kev Strong is a senior SEO Consultant for Newcastle upon Tyne based Mediaworks Online Marketing working with national and international brands.

He can often be found posting insightful tips, tricks and search related rants on his personal blog, Goosh.

The post below is a guest post from Mindy Gofton from Manchester based digital marketing agency I-Com

So how much value do blog comment links and social bookmarks actually have? We’re talking about links with the rel=”nofollow” attribute here. Links that are not meant to pass any sort of PageRank value, links which have been so labelled so as to tell search engines “I don’t recommend this site – the link is either advertising or has been added by the site owner and I haven’t checked it to decide if it’s spam or not.” Some SEO commentators have humorously referred to “nofollow” as being a link condom in that putting it onto your link allows you to connect anywhere you like without having to deal with the consequences!

Theoretically, then, these “nofollow” links should be worthless which means all mentions across sites such as Twitter and Friendfeed, et. al. should be fairly worthless from an SEO perspective. So why, when we downloaded a list of links to the I-COM blog from Webmaster Tools, did Google report links such as the following:

• http://twitter.com/SearchDesignDev
• http://twitter.com/behappy2day
• http://twitter.com/searchdesigndev
• http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/black-hole-seo-dont-get-sucked-in/
• http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/friendfeed_hotter_than_ever_or_fading.php
• http://twitter.com/SearchDesignDev/lists/memberships
• http://twitter.com/loggedout/profile/SearchDesignDev
• http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/10/09/is-twitter-selling-links-and-what-in-the-world-is-a-promotion
• http://digg.com/music/Online_Reputation_Management_Ryanair_vs_Franz_Ferdinand
• http://sphinn.com/story/119344
• http://sphinn.com/user/sphunn/philipnorton42/
• http://friendfeed.com/searchdesigndev/34670708/google-chrome-people-are-reading-about-it-but
• http://friendfeed.com/tinotriste/8502cea1/google-chrome-people-are-reading-about-it-but?service=digg
• http://sphinn.com/story/109531
• http://friendfeed.com/searchdesigndev/358d4dce/google-why-screw-up-with-indexing-and-not-admit?login=1
• http://friendfeed.com/searchdesigndev/358d4dce/google-why-screw-up-with-indexing-and-not-admit?login=1&comment=358d4dce-65b5-ccf1-7528-887913044c4a
• http://friendfeed.com/searchdesigndev/34670708/google-chrome-people-are-reading-about-it-but
• http://friendfeed.com/tinotriste/8502cea1/google-chrome-people-are-reading-about-it-but?service=digg
• http://sphinn.com/story/109531
• http://friendfeed.com/searchdesigndev/358d4dce/google-why-screw-up-with-indexing-and-not-admit?login=1
• http://friendfeed.com/searchdesigndev/358d4dce/google-why-screw-up-with-indexing-and-not-admit?login=1&comment=358d4dce-65b5-ccf1-7528-887913044c4a
• http://twitter.com/Justhipper/status/13546530474

You get the idea – all of these are links marked with a rel=”nofollow” attribute whether they are blog comments, tweets, or other types of social bookmarks of our various posts.

If these have no worth, then why is Google reporting them in Webmaster Tools? It makes no sense to me why they would report a list of useless links to distract SEO consultants from reverse engineering the algorithm. I mean, why bother reporting anything at all? Why give us any sort of incentive to clog up useful social media sites with crap even further, in hopes it’ll boost rankings when it won’t? This behaviour would, essentially, be Google giving SEOs the green light to spam up good sites for nefarious purposes and I don’t see what Google has against social media sites that the company would wish this level of badness on them.

This leaves us with a second option – even those “nofollow” links have some value. They may not pass PageRank, but they are telling Google something that’s useful for them to know.

Bear with my logic for a minute here:

The major search engines created rel=”nofollow”, to stop comment and forum spam from getting out of hand. Webmasters were being inundated and by adding a rel=”nofollow” link to anything that wasn’t added to the site by the Webmaster; it made it pointless for SEOs to use this form of link building to achieve any sort of result.

Then Matt Cutts told us to also use rel=”nofollow” on advertising. Surely, by putting an ad on your site to someone else’s site it is some form of recommendation. Alternatively, to put it another way, would you put an ad on your website to a product or service that you knew was a scam? No. You wouldn’t. Well, at least I wouldn’t – nor would any of my clients. So that rel=”nofollow” is a little unfair to the sites being linked. Surely, there is some signal going back to Google, even if it isn’t factored into PageRank.

Then clever SEOs started using rel=”nofollow” to “sculpt” their own internal PageRank. Google claims to have counteracted this by making rel=”nofollow” links take a percentage of the PageRank flowing away from the other outbound links on a page without passing any PageRank or anchor text weight to the target page. So, the rel=”nofollow” has started to take on a variety of uses for which it was never intended (some of which Google has had to counteract with an algorithm tweak).

Spammers being what they are, social/user generated content sites have been slowly queuing up to add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all external links in order to stop themselves turning into unwitting link farms.

Whether I label a link “nofollow” or not; when I post a link on Twitter, it is a recommendation; when I bookmark a link on StumbleUpon, it is a recommendation. When I link any site from an active account with lots of connections and I regularly recommend content from a variety of sites, then that’s an even bigger signal that it’s a legitimate recommendation.

Google folding in real time social results into the SERPs is another suggestion that they consider these valid recommendations. Spending time and money on this development and cataloguing all of this data makes no sense otherwise, considering the scrolling results have little value to normal searchers.

The use of citations as a local search-ranking factor suggests that Google is also starting to understand and analyse the many ways people recommend things online. Why wouldn’t they build this into the main algorithm in some way, using social mentions as a signal for quality – even if it doesn’t contribute to the PageRank section of the algorithm?

The way people use the internet and share content on the internet has changed. Everybody has a say now, not just those savvy enough to understand how to build a web page, and increasingly people are looking for recommendations for good websites, products and services conversationally through social media sites and those people don’t really care if the recommendations pass PageRank – they’re given freely between “friends” to be social.

It follows that search engines have had to change and adapt the way they rank useful websites, and that these changes will continue to affect the way we need to promote sites and the way in which we think about links and what makes them good. If Google is telling webmasters that they’re cataloguing rel=”nofollow” social links and we know they aren’t passing PageRank, then they must be passing something; so maybe it’s time to ask Google to give us some indication of why they’re reporting these links and what value they might have?

This seems to have come a little out of left field – however one shouldn’t be surprised as this is going to bring the policies for the UK (and Europe) in line with that of the US. Google have today announced revisions to their trademark policies that applies to complaints that we receive regarding use of trademarks as keywords within Google adwords adverts.

As of September 14 2010, keywords that were restricted as a result of a trademark investigation will no longer be restricted in most European countries. These include:

• Austria
• Belgium
• Bulgaria
• Bouvet Island
• Switzerland
• Cyprus
• Czech Republic
• Germany
• Denmark
• Spain
• Estonia
• Finland
• France
• France
• Gibraltar
• Guadeloupe
• Greece
• French Guiana
• Hungary
• Iceland
• Ireland
• Italy
• Liechtenstein
• Lithuania
• Luxembourg
• Latvia
• Monaco
• Malta
• Martinique
• Mayotte
• New Caledonia
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Poland
• Portugal
• French Polynesia
• Reunion
• Romania
• Svalbard
• Saint Pierre and Miquelon
• Slovakia
• Slovenia
• Sweden
• United Kingdom
• Wallis and Futuna
• Åland
• Guernsey
• Isle of Man
• Jersey
• Saint Martin
• Bassas da India
• Clipperton Island
• Europa Island
• Jan Mayen
• Tromelin Island
• Saint Barthelemy
• Glorioso Islands
• Juan de Nova Island
• French Southern and Antarctic Lands

Under the new policy advertisers will be be able to complain if they feel that a specific ad text confuses users about the origin of the advertised goods and services. Google will then conduct a limited investigation and if we find that the ad text does confuse users as to the origin of the advertised goods and services, we will remove the ad.

However, Google will not prevent use of trademarks as keywords. Examples of this could include:

• ads using a trademarked term in a descriptive or generic way, such as not in reference to the term as a trademark
• ads for competing products or services
• ads for informational sites about a product or service corresponding to the trademark
• ads for resale of the trademarked goods or services
• ads for the sale of components, replacement parts, or compatible products corresponding to a trademark

For further information regarding the updates on the Google Trademark laws, click here
The official Google release can be found here

There used to be a time when one was fairly limited in terms of available search engine ranking tools, however these days there are a number of tools available which can measure a sites current visibility within the search engines, and a number of them take that a step further integrating other information such as traffic etc into them as well.

Advanced Web Ranking
Price: $99 to $599 per annum
Rating: ****

The ranking tool of choice for many search engine optimisation companies in the UK, Advanced Web Ranking offers a range of features including a comprehensive competitor analysis tool, a top sites feature and an overall visibility summary. Unlike many of its modern day competitors the AWR system is a self hosted solution costing in between $99 and $599 per annum for unlimited websites.

SEOMoz Ranktracker
Price: Requires Pro Membership – from $79 per month
Rating: **
One of the tools from the impressive suite of tools coming out of Rand Fishkins SEOMoz empire. Ranktracker comes as part of the Pro toolset and allows a number of features including historical tracking and emailing alerts. As a standalone tool – probably not as comprehensive as some of the other tools – but thats until you take the rest of the SEOMoz tools into account.

WebPosition
Price: Free to $49.99+Usage
Rating: ***

If you think of web ranking, Web Position will inevitably spring to mind as one of the weapons of choice. With tools like Webposition Gold, they held a prominent position in the ranking toolkit for a while – however that market share has seen a significant shift in recent years. The new system allows the following features:

• Online Any Time: Access anytime, anywhere, nothing to download or install.
• Private and Secure: Your data is secure with SSL encryption.
• Custom Reports: Customize your report views with one-click sorting, easily export the data you need.
• Scheduled Reporting: Set your reports to regularly run each day, week or month.
• White Labeling (New): Brand online and PDF reports with your logo.
• Secure Online Sharing (New): Give clients and colleagues online access to white label ranking reports.
• Safe Queries: Reporter runs the searches for you anonymously.

Recent developments have seen a migration away from the desktop application of old, to a new shiny web interface – which obviously negates the issues with proxies and the like of previous iterations. The display is still significantly better than comparable tools such as AWR – however I would suggest tools such as AWR carry far more weight in terms of overall information available to marketeers.

Raven SEO Tools
Price: $19 to $1499 per month
Rating: ****
Something I came across a while ago – but one I have really got into with avengence over the last couple of weeks.

The Raven SEO suite of tools have provided a highly usable set of playthings including:

• Keyword Research Tool
• Link Tracking and Monitoring Tool
• Blog Manager
• Social Media Persona Manager
• Rank Checker
• Competitor Analysis Tools
• Analytics (integrated with Google Analytics)

Source: SharkSEO

Rankchecker
Price: Free
Rating: **
However if all else fails – theres always Aaron Wall’s wonderful SEOBook plugin which includes the Rankchecker within it. Whilst its not going to set the world on fire, it provides a reasonably solid foundation should you need to do a quick check on your rankings without any of the above tools at your disposal – above all its free.

Links, links, links – its a fundamental part of many modern search engine optimisation campaign. Ever since the day, Google developed their Backrub system the link has been a living online currency, increasingly comodotised by Google’s ongoing reliance on utilising link signals as part of their algorithm.

That is hardly suprising. Google is the lovechild of two scholars (Larry Page and Sergei Brin and the concept of backrub is similar to that of citations, a widely recognised academic method of recognising the authority of a particular document (research) over another. Given other potential signals such as social recommendations are in their infancy, the likelihood of the link as the mainstay of many campaigns is likely to continue for the time being.

I am therefore amazed that many organisations are still unaware or unwilling to integrate offline promotional activity into their SEO campaigns. Whilst I would add that in certain non-competitive sectors, it is possible to position your site with little or no offsite activity (particularly as Google appears to be factoring exact match url’s far more expansively these days), it is also imperative to understand that you are not going to get your site to the top of the search engines on a competitive vertical without focussing a heavy percentage of your activity into off-page promotional activity.

So what should you be considering as part of your off-page activity.

A link isn’t only for christmas

Link building is not a one off. You wouldn’t run a TV advert once and expect to get a massive response (excluding massive mass audience events such as the Superbowl or the World Cup Final), so why would you do the same with your link building and expect mass responses from it.

Link building is an ongoing process. This should also integrate multiple channels, particularly if you are looking for a long term focus on your search engine rankings. Social bookmarking, content spinning/distribution, PR distribution and the like should all be integrated (and even more so if you are looking at integrating potentially more ‘aggressive links’ within your link acquisition.

Further to this, compare site A against site B. Site A builds 10000 links one month and then stops (lets take potential Google evaluation of doing this out of the analysis, segmentation or differences in site authority), Site B only builds 750, but then continues to build links from there – 1000 the next, 1000 thereafter ongoing. WHilst Site A may take a lead initially over the long term Site B will start to take a foothold and eventually will overtake Site A. Thus don’t let your link building stand still.

Should Social be my mainstay

Social would appear to be a massive buzzword in the industry at present. Facebook, Twitter, Sprouter (who? – take a look) have all been mentioned at some point or another – and many from a link building perspective.

There is no doubting Google in particular can take some of this data and evaluate it – and the likelihood is that Google will continue to use this information as part of its evaluation process. However David Harry has mentioned this in the Dojo a number of times – particularly given the potential unreliability in terms of noise – which could significantly impact the potential usability of this from a behavioural perspective.

From a link building perspective, social activity has its place. Social bookmarks for example can provide a high churn, low value way of getting links to your website – not the earth shattering linkage but linkage all the same. However sites such as Twitter often utilise a multitude of redirect tools (which whilst many are 301 based) this is further confounded by the use of nofollows on many of the networks themselves (ie Twitter etc)

Paid links vs Content Strategies

This is a massive issue for many organisations. There is no doubting that paid linkage does work. Look at many verticals and paid links play a part in many of the link patterns of many organisations. However from a client perspective, these have a double edged sword.

Many paid links are based on tenancies. This can often mean that these links are often only valuable for a certain period of time. Once the tenancy expires, you either have to lose the link or renew which can make such campaigns expensive when compared to other link acquisition campaigns. That said, in many cases SEO is so significantly more cost effective than many other channels such as paid search or display that such business cases for increased link budgets can often be easily negotiated.

Content campaigns are often a preferred version of developing linkage to sites. Many well planned and implemented campaigns can have life times beyond the initial distribution of the content piece, providing value indefinitely to the site itself. Many organisations utilise these as significant part of the link acquisition campaigns, whether via guest posts or press distribution, These campaigns pay for themselves not only via the associated link benefits of a well received and authoritative piece of content but also in terms of the ongoing traffic benefits from such a piece of content.

Given the nature of many of the results at present, I would suggest this is still open to personal preference however on a personal note I wouldn’t rely on one technique – although if I did it would certainly be the content option. To compound this the development of content networks as a part of this as a SEO link building technique would potentially further muddy these waters.

Kelvin Newman raised an interesting conversation on Twitter earlier, which myself, Judith Lewis and Duncan Parry amongst others responded to. For those that don’t know what we are talking about, this was regarding the miss-selling of SEO/SEM services by unscrupulous organisations more keen on a quick buck than providing valuable or useful services – which often further fuel the ‘SEO is snake oil’ fire.

Further to that Andrew Girdwood from Bigmouthmedia raised a similar issue in a recent post on E-Consultancy

Its a problem that has long since loomed over the SEO industry, and one that isn’t likely to go away quickly. We aren’t the only profession with such an issue – a couple of weeks off (and morning television) have highlighted that unfortunately many professions share similar problems – however I think we need to take a look at their approaches and learn.

Many other problems have been approached by educating people on how to identify potential ‘snake oil’ salesman, on how to identify when there may be something suspect afoot and probably as important – what to do if something does go awry.

This is something we as a profession have often had problems addressing for a number of reasons

• Lack of professional accreditation
• Lack of single regulatory body
• Lack of transparency – The smoke and mirrors approach is unfortunately still alive and well
• SEO differences. Lets be honest ‘corporate SEO’ is a different game to ‘SMB SEO’

and therein lies the issue. How do you overcome these significant issues?

Further to this Greg Sterling’s recent post on ‘Report: UK SMBs Not Very SEO Savvy’ suggested a significant issue particularly in this sector. In the study (compiled by Thomson Local and Analytics SEO), they concluded

• 47% of all business websites have none or very basic levels of SEO
• Over 70% of companies with less than 50 employees have none or very basic levels of SEO
• Unsurprisingly larger companies tend to have better websites
• With a few exceptions, the length of time a business has been trading or the type of business has little on no bearing on the quality of its website
• 12% of all business websites are not indexed in any search engine
• 0.6% of business websites are under construction
• Only 3% of all business websites could be considered to have advanced levels of SEO

I would perhaps suggest the SMB sector is particularly at danger of these unscrupulous operators, for a number of reasons most notably often a lack of skilled resource making the decision, the lack of formal purchase processes’ often associated with larger organisational purchases and the requirement for increased revenue often at significantly reduced budgets. Unfortunately, when you get burned on such instances you don’t often come back for seconds, and will often draw overall conclusions of the profession as a whole.

I think Duncan Parry may have part of the answer in his two responses, combined with Judith’s response as regards awareness via the burgeoning conference circuit.

Conferences in particular do provide a way for the business community to find out more about SEO, however my concerns is that this is not comprehensive enough and often puts the onus on a business owner to find out more before he knows he potentially has a problem. It thus needs support from the wider business community to provide it with the ability to infiltrate particularly the smaller organisations – which I would suggest as Duncan said would be best handled at a central core.

However other options would need to be utilised to support this and could include:

• More expansive relationships from industry bodies with small business organisations such as the Chamber of Commerce
• Greater rollout of free/cheap search seminars. Larger conferences can be cost prohibitive thus events such as Brighton SEO and Manchester SEO could provide such an opportunity
• Support from industry organisations such as the IAB/SEMPO etc
• Constant support from the ‘core’ SEO community as a whole

There is no point going out and selling a standard way of SEO to the business audience as that is what makes SEO the industry it is – and lets face it – what works today – may not work tomorrow. However by allowing the business community to spot the warning signs, and the scammers, we give our industry the best chance of an increasingly favourable perception not only within the wider business community but by our wider peers as well.

In what surely has to be one of the best value SEO conferences in the country (mostly because it costs absolutely nothing!), BrightonSEO, organised by Kelvin Newman from Sitevisibility, kicked off its 3rd meet up, and second conference on the 23rd July 2010 with a packed crowd – there were seats for 95, and there must have been at least 20 or 30 more folks sat on the floor or gathered around the door.

Whilst I have not been to any of the “big” SEO conferences like SMX, the general consensus from those that had, was that there was a lot more value in the presentations that were given here than at many conferences that can cost big money.

The day was split into sections:

Social Media Shenanigans
The New Age of Statistical and Data Driven SEO
Giving Link Building the Creativity it Deserves
Eye Openers

With the Social Media Shenanigans segment, Kevin Gibbons from SEOptimise was the first up with 20 WordPress Plugins to Supercharge Your Blog.

Brighton SEO – 20 Top WordPress Plugins

One of the standout ones here that I hadn’t used before were Blackbird Pie, a plugin that allows you to get the embed HTML from a tweet, retaining the styling of a tweet.

Broken Link Checker is one that I have started to use quite a bit recently, as it can help identify and tidy up those pesky broken links that happen from time to time on a blog.

Another standout interesting one here was the A/B Theme Testing plugin, which allows you to show different themes to users to test which one works best for you – I can certainly see some uses for that!

Next up was Cedric Wooding from Jollywise, with A Practical Guide to Managing a Facebook Advertising Campaign.

This started with a lot of the basics of how the system works, and the different types of advert available. It was interesting to learn some of the factors that affect the price – geolocation targeting, age demographics, languages and likes and interests, with these also giving estimates of the number of people that will be reached by this.

There was a case study of work that they had done in the tennis arena with the WTA, where they increased the number of likes from 7k to 225k in 6 weeks.

The most important take away here was that if you spend decent money with Facebook, they get much more interested in your activities on the site and much more helpful – by all accounts its important to get to know them well.

Next up was Annabel Hodges (better known to many as searchpanda) with When is an SEO Campaign not an SEO Campaign.

Annabel explained that she has 2 passions (other than Pandas), creating integrated strategies and multi-lingual campaigns, and has been doing her SEO work for a multi-faceted agency, where search isn’t always the priority, and they have been brought in too late, and the age old problem of butting heads with designers.

We then looked at a couple of case studies for C4 Education and New Look.

The education one was a very interesting approach – they looked to rank for generic teacher resources on content that had been created for teenagers, but teachers generally search more subject specifically than that. So the content was distributed to other sites, and many of the successes with the campaign was on increasing the visibility of that content on those websites rather than the main one itself.

All the sites in that project had big increases in visibility, large increased referral traffic for the main resource, lots more brand traffic and lots of feedback from users of the site that already knew about it, but hadn’t realised that they could use it as a teaching resource.

The next was a campaign for New Look TV – a site that they ran completely from YouTube. The main New Look site was geared up for the sale, and they wanted a microsite to be visible where the retail site couldn’t be, for celebrity launches and other similar types of searches. Rankings here focused on video friendly terms, and the videos themselves were presented by competition winners (and we were treated to some of the best of the worst of those auditions).

The result was that the terms that this was coming up for were ranking up against the media rather than ecommerce type sites, and helped them to increase visibility in areas that they previously had none.

Annabel impressed upon us the need to think beyond keywords and links and to come up with integrated approaches.

Next up was the Stats and Data session, starting with Mark Cook from Further, looking at Making Accurate Traffic Predictions.

We started with a problem – the Google Adwords Traffic estimation tool is “rubbish”, but Insights for Search is better, and much more accurate – although doesn’t give numbers, just indications of volume.

Mark went on to explain in greater detail how they can use all sorts of data to turn in to fairly accurate estimations of how much traffic a particular phrase can likely generate in specific positions on the SERP, and make estimations based on that for traffic predictions – with the long tail in many respects acting as the “buffer” to prevent any issues with over-estimating these (especially as we all know that no guarantees can be made regarding where those rankings will get to)

This was one of the standout presentations of the day – the only reason I don’t want to go into too much detail of this is because of the nature of some of this data – but rest assured, these were some cracking ideas.

Next up was Rob Green from iCrossing, talking about Data Analysis for SEO.

This involved using the Google Keyword Tool and Competitor Analysis data and pivoting it around to identify faster win targets.

Rob also suggested looking at terms that have universal search results on them and impressed upon the audience the need to collect more data to make more informed decisions.

A very interesting point for me was about how SEO can help grow the brand itself, and as a result of increased visibility on non brand terms, this can drive an increase in brand and direct visitors to the website.

Rob also felt that first click attribution could well give SEO an even higher ROI, as many initial searches start in the research phase, with the purchase being made much further down the line.

Nikki Rae from Fresh Egg was presenting next with Custom Variables in Google Analytics. This is a way of using some extra functionality within Google Analytics, and allows to help manipulate and segment all the data being collected about a website into much more meaningful groupings.

This allows for much more granular data review, allowing for page level data reviews or visit/session level data.

I’ve done some work with this in the past, but clearly this can be used very much more creatively when you want to gain different insights into the data you are collecting.

Nikki is an entertaining presenter, she got a number of members of the audience participating in an amusing demonstration of what she was showing us here.

Essentially, these custom variables seem to be very effective at tracking micro goals very effectively, and are certainly something that I am going to be investigating further.

Sam Crocker from Distilled was the next presenter, with Using Competitions in SEO, starting off the link building segment.

Sam was very keen on bringing creativity into link building efforts, and that even for the most “boring” of sites, there was something that could be done to promote some interest.

I know that I have tried to run competitions before, and at times “selling” it to your client is not always the easiest thing. Sam had some ideas on how to sell this effectively to clients, with benefits from increasing brand awareness and increasing audience – but clearly one of the main reasons this was being discussed was for the links – and links from sources that would otherwise be much harder to get.

Sam then gave us some examples of a photo competition that they ran that got links from a number of highly authoritative photo blogs and magazines.

It is important to have a seedlist to get the ball rolling with this type of competition, and Sam had a list of competition directories that were always a good place to get this started with.

This was a really good presentation, but in the closing arguments, there was 1 very important detail, re-iterated twice – people cheat, and you need to be prepared for the possibility (and if it gets big, the likelihood) that there will be a lot if it going on.

Simon Dance from cheapflights.co.uk was up next with Linkbuilding & CRM.

With this talk Simon took us on a whirlwhind tour of a fantastic assortment of programs and tools that he uses to manage various elements of link building work.

Simon made some really good points about how linkbuilding needs to streamline the admin efforts to track it, and break out more into forming longer term relationships with larger numbers of people, and impressed upon the audience that picking up the phone to these contacts plays an important part of that.

The more you form those relationships, the harder it becomes for your competitors to mimic that influence, as it is something that goes beyond that link – if you have close relationships with some of the people giving you the best links this then reduces the chances that they will also be prepared to link to one of your competitors.

Some of the tools that were used that were most interesting here included Buzzstream, Highrise and Backpack, a sister package to Basecamp, something that I have been using a lot over the last year.

Finally we were on to the eye opener topics, starting with Rishi Lakhani and Actually Making SEO Happen. Rishi was a thoroughly entertaining presenter, with some important messages to get across about getting SEO work done when working with big brands. Considering his early claims of “hating doing presentations” and “not being a very good SEO”, I think that the information he got across and in the manner he did probably proves otherwise on both points.

Rishi talked about SEO coming in different sizes, and how the people that look to employ SEO agencies are never going to have (or in fact need) the knowledge about SEO that we do. SEO suppliers need to be able to talk to their clients in a language that they understand – and that is the impact that it will have on the bottom line, rather than a report that an SEO has spent a long time making pretty.

One quote here really stood out for me “SEO isn’t just SEO anymore, you need to be a politician, marketer, public speaker and a lobbyist too”, and this is something I have been finding more and more the longer that I work in the industry.

And the final point in Rishi’s talk here was to always have a back up plan in case the initial tactic and strategy doesn’t work – something that I thoroughly agree with!

Zachary Colbert from White Hat Media looking at Lev Manovich’s theory of Linking & Association.

This was a big departure from the rest of the presentations, and centred on a less search oriented slant – instead this was looking at “are hyperlinks making us stupid?”

The essential thrust of this, as I understood it, is that does supplying a link to more information, mean that we use our minds less – because the information is available via clicking through and then reading that, we limit our potential to have a “reaction” to it, without it being influenced by that content.

I can kind of see where this was coming from – due to the ability to access information on the internet freely, and with smartphone from just about everywhere, I have found myself searching for things that I know I used to be able to remember – bet then that could also be the aging process!

Finally, Nichola Stott from the Mediaflow finished us up with Challenging the Conventional Wisdom of Anchor Text, a continuation of an excellent article “Are We Over-Engineering the Link Graph?”

This was centred on a review of a fairly static, but monetised search term “Outdoor Clothing”. We were looking at the breakdown of brand versus keyword focused anchors, and looking at correlations in this data.

The interesting point with this study, is that sites with (home pages) that had lots of brand based links were ranking highly in this SERP, whilst the site that had the most keyword oriented links was languishing much further down the page.

This sparked some debate around the room, with discussion looking at whether or not keyword anchors perhaps work more effectively with deeper pages, and that it is natural for a home page to have a high number of brand based links in general, particularly if it is a well known brand.

It was also posed that it is likely that different types of search term have differing levels of sensitivity to this over-engineering of the link graph, and that more studies needed to be performed to test further.

Once the presentations were all done, there was time for a big thanks to Kelvin for all of his work getting the event organised. It was then time to go and put faces to Twitter avatars and meet some familiar faces from previous events, back at the spiritual home of Brightonseo, a local pub, the Quadrant.

This is a guest post by Peter Handley, SEO Team Leader from Vertical Leap down on the South Coast.

As it appears many of you know, my wife gave birth to our third child (and my first daughter) – Sophie Grace on Friday night.

Since that moment, I have been amazed by the response from many of my peers in the industry, and I have to thank everyone for their congratulations and kind wishes since then. In particular:

• Sophie Bradshaw
• Andy Betts
• Amrit Gill
• Richard Hudson
• Rob Watts
• Richard Shove
• Dom Hodgson (the Hodge)
• Matt Rycroft (discuit)
• Sorbet Digital
• Sarah Carling
• Julie Joyce
• Peter Handley
• Dave Perris (SharkSEO)
• Paul Madden (SEOIdiot)
• Tino Triste
• Nick David
• James Hanson
• Mark Hope
• Ian Miller
• Haylee Taylor
• Rhys Wynne
• Kieron Hughes
• Sadie Sherran
• Richard Baxter
• Louis Venter
• Bas Van Den Beld
• Richard Gregory
• Daniel Alderson
• Guy Levine
• Kelvin Newman
• David Tutin
• James Chapman
• Joanna Butler
• Freya Jones (x3)
• Nik Burton
• Rishi Lakhani
• Geoff Andrews
• Agnete Johansen
• Joroen Van Eck
• Nick Wilsdon
• Barry Adams
• Jeff Sebring

Also a big thank you to the State of Search bloggers for the blog post this morning.

Its nice to see in an industry which has evolved so much since the community forum days of old that there is still a huge sense of goodwill and wellbeing in the industry

(PS I am sorry I turned this into a mass thank you )

If there are two things you can set your watch by in SEO, it’s the launch of a Google Killer each summer, and the time of year when we start talking about how next year is the year when Mobile Internet will finally take off.

So here we are, middle of 2010, a decade on from the dot.com crash, Google are still the dominant force in search, and I’m reliably informed that next year will be the big year for mobile.

Except it will, and it’s also likely to be the year when we finally see a credible competitor to Google’s dominance.
One of the factors that drove the insane growth that led to the dot com collapse was the idea of the network effect, the concept of spending as much money as possible in order to make a land grab. The web was seen as an opportunity to be a single store serving a million people, whereas the reality was that the web actually became an entity in which a million stores could serve one person each.

Search is tough. You need a lot of cash to do it properly. Google’s earnings report may state that they had revenue $6.24billion in the last three months, but they had to spend heavily to do it. It cost them just under $2 billion. That’s a hell of a barrier to entry.

When you employ around 20,000 people, many of them highly paid PHDs from some of the best universities in the world, you’re going to end up with a pretty big wage bill. Add onto that the cost of building massive data centres all over the world, buying thousands of servers, and the electricity you need to run them, and you soon see why it’s tricky to offer a credible threat to Google. You don’t become a Google killer overnight, and right now there isn’t the space in the market to be one.

So where is this Google Killer?
Biggest threat to Google? Apps.
Whether they’re on an iPhone, Android, WebOS, or Windows Mobile, Apps are becoming the de facto way of accessing information via a mobile phone. When they’re well designed, they can quickly become essential. They’re also typically developed cheaply, require comparatively little infrastructure to host, and they serve a single function for a single small audience – the equivalent of a million shops to serve a single person compared to Google’s one size fits all.
The fact is that even with a 5 bar signal on a good quality 3G network, it still takes too long to access the “proper” internet for it to provide a compelling user experience. With an app, where the interface is stored locally, and the data is provided through a compressed xml feed, users get a much better experience – try Twitter via mobile web, and Twitter via an iPhone client to see the difference.

The Data Makes the Difference
Or rather, the presentation of the data makes the difference. The availability of data via feeds or via API access to 3rd parties means that it is possible for developers to create high quality, useful applications that provide instant access to huge amounts of data without the need for a complex back end infrastructure – you can call it Search Lite if you like.
Without the infrastructure, you can iterate quickly, and throw out new versions on a rapid cycle. You don’t need to crawl billions of web pages to find information, simply process the data from other feeds. With traction and a significant user base, paid inclusion becomes the norm.

So Where Does SEO fit in?
Everywhere.
Wherever people search, and whatever they search for, they tend to behave in the same way. Provided that SEO people understand a little bit of psychology and perform some analysis into how traffic is generated for a particular vertical, transferring the learnings from one platform to another is straightforward. Every search function works in a similar way, so whether you’re optimising a feed for use across apps, or a web page for Google, the rules are the same – make it relevant to what the user you want to target is looking for.

James Lowery is the Head of SEO and Affiliates at Latitude Digital Marketing. Apart from his obvious infatuation with the Internet, he likes a laugh at the wrong moment, and badly structured PowerPoint presentations. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/yrewol

Getting your website structure right, from both a search engine and user point of view, is extremely important. The easier it is for your content to be found, the more likely more people are to find it – it all sounds so simple, right?

The importance of website structure stretches beyond the perceived basics, and there are many justifications for spending the time on effort on getting a website structure right the first time (during the setup of a new website, ideally). From the distribution and layout of important products and services, to the considerations of keyword targeting and search engine visibility, there are many implications of getting things right or wrong. Below I examine a few of them in further detail.

Hierarchy

Starting with the most broad-level point, the hierarchy of your website defines the dependencies of each of the web pages within a site. Generally speaking, websites no longer have flat hierarchies due to the complex nature of the data that needs to be portrayed, and hierarchy plays an important role in forming the natural relationships within your website.

Ensuring you determine the most appropriate hierarchy for your website depends on a number of factors, such as product or service categorisation, logical grouping, and the results derived from keyword research. Any initial thoughts you have in relation to the hierarchy of your website may be very relevant, but ensure you confirm any decisions prior to implementation through keyword/industry research to understand the way users are searching, and to research any potential uniformed standards.

Remember to ensure, as a rule of thumb, that pages are no more than a few clicks away from a user; and although this aphorism is widely-used when talking about navigation, it’s also very relevant to page hierarchy.

URLs

Digging down into the more specific implications of website structure leads us to URL structure. Essentially the structure of a web page URL should reflect how the page appears in the overall hierarchy of the website. So for example, a product that is named ‘Epson Stylus S21′ and appears in the printers section of the website, the URL structure should follow the visualisation, such as:

www.example.com/printers/epson-stylus-s21/

As a side note, use dashes in URLs over underscores.

The forming of web page URLs is seen as an important aspect of SEO nowadays, with Google and other major search engines seemingly favouring websites with keywords present in the URL. Although the most weight is given to keyword-rich domains, considerations should be made to keyword placement within specific web page URLs (this should be logical anyway in most cases).

As you will no doubt hear Matt Cutts say a hundred times if you sit through all of the Webmaster Help videos on YouTube, if something is logical and works well for a visiting users, then the search engines should like it too – and this is something that I heavily believe is true with website URLs. It’s surprising the amount of people who actually navigate by removing parts of a URL (techy people mostly, no doubt), so it is important to reflect your website structure within them.

Sitemaps

Next up in our list of website structure implications is sitemaps (both static and XML). One thing that annoys me greatly when visiting a website (especially big sites) is when I look at the sitemap to find a specific page or category, and I am presented with an almighty list of left-aligned links. Most (good) content management systems now make it very easy for sitemaps to be created that reflect the hierarchy of a website, providing it is setup correctly, and this can make a big difference in terms of usability.

A static sitemap is present to provide a reflection of how the pages are laid out within the website (in terms of navigation and structure). Essentially, this list of navigational links should show depth and relationships, but without being overpowering. For large websites, restrict the sitemap and have numerous ones to split the various categories and sections – the same of which applies to XML sitemaps for the search engines.

Breadcrumbs

Not only are breadcrumbs extremely useful for navigational and usability reasons, they can now contribute toward enhanced SERP listings within Google. As with page URLs, navigational breadcrumbs allow a user with a visual way of navigating up through the hierarchy, which can improve page views and decrease the overall bounce rate of a website. If a web page is categorised inappropriately or illogically then breadcrumbs are nothing short of useless, so strive for perfection when mapping out the site.

Coincidentally, if you are using WordPress, then Yoast’s Breadcrumb plugin is awesome.

Page Content Relevancy/Distribution

One aspect of SEO that is clearly becoming more important is the semantic linking of relevance; be it key phrases or the actual displaying of data. As the semantic web continues to evolve, search engines are looking more and more at potential triggers that can allow them to understand data. Micro formats have provided web masters with a means of semantically marking up web data to ensure it is easily identifiable, but other factors are undoubtedly used in some instances to allow them to form understanding.

By not giving consideration to your website structure, you are potentially confusing both the visiting users and the search engines. Having a page about an Epson computer printer next to one about garden lights (for example) may seem like it’s ok on the outset, but that is essentially going to give off many mixed signals about the message you are trying to portray. Semantically, pages or information about printers should be next to printer ink cartridges, and this example should help to portray how content relevance and distribution plays such a big part in website structure – although, as I say, this should all be logical.

Consider The Implications

Whether you are able to be involved at the beginning stages of a website, or have to put a strategy in place post-launch, it is important to consider all of the implications involved in the structure. Getting the structure right first time, including all of the technical and usability aspects, can really set a website out as an authority both in the eyes of visiting users and the search engines. Finally, allow keyword research to change the scope of initial thinking, while ensuring logicality remains within the hierarchy, navigation and overall layout.

The following guest post is courtesy of PushON search marketing consultant Kieron Hughes.
Follow Kieron Hughes on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/kieronhughes

This is a very interesting find coming from the States, found originally by Linda Buquet of Catalyst eMarketing which could have a very interesting impact on a number of advertisers relating to local search.

Source: Blumenthals.com

Interestingly this has a number of significant changes particularly

1. Map migrated from central position to right hand column, moving the paid search results down
2. Standard organic search results slightly larger in size against local search results
3. Map follows you down the page
4. Local results appear to still use traditional SEO real estate – meta descriptions
5. Reviews included with ‘local results’

Why do I suggest this is significant, well for a number of reasons:

1. This is a further fusion of traditional organic results with a blended search result. However this time it goes one step further by including local features within both traditional organic and paid search real estate
2. The migration of the map down the right hand side pushes down the paid search ads. This could have a significant impact on advertisers who have traditionally chosen to target the ‘considered searcher’ and kept away from the top 3 positions. Net result could be increased CPC on top terms, and lower CTR on the side advertisers.
3. The local results still look like normal results. Given some of the recent tests I have seen where the paid search results look very similar to the organic results in style – this is interesting to see this carried through to real estate which has previously been kept very different in style

I haven’t seen this migrate to any UK results however one would suggest this may only be a matter of time

Google – What took you so long?

The only suprising thing in my opinion about Google’s announcement that they are to buy ITA is that they haven’t done something like this sooner. First we had Froogle/Base/Products, then Merchant Search (Finance), then we had Google Real Estate and now Google have announced that the Travel Sector is now on their hitlist.

ITA is a Boston (US) based software company specialising in organising airline data such as flight times, flight availability and pricing, similar to Amadeus (one of its biggest competitors). Given the synergies between ITA and Google in terms of data management, one would suggest this is a match made in heaven, and one that is likely to have significant repurcutions in the UK particularly for the likes of TravelSupermarket, Cheap Flights and potentially even more traditional travel organisations such as the airlines.

So why is this such big news. Well ITA provide information to a number of different vendors such as Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Bing, Continental Airlines, Hotwire, Kayak, Orbitz, Southwest Airlines, TripAdvisor, United Airlines, US Airways, Virgin Atlantic Airways and others who rely on this ITA data and will be a particular blow to Kayak and probably more so Bing who currently use the ITA results. Given the almost constant oneupmanship between the two over the course of the last couple of years, this would rank up their with the best of them

Source: Google.com

The deal will allow Google to pursue the creation of new flight search tools that will enable users to find better flight information more easily on the Internet. Google is excited about ITA’s QPX business and the opportunity to work closely with current and future customers. Google will honor all existing agreements and looks forward to adding new partners.

This is not the first travel related acquisition Google have done this year, with the purchases of Ruba earlier this year indicative of their intent. Further to much of the buzz round a potential takeover of Expedia in 2008/2009, this may suggest Google have decided to ‘create’ their own version of Expedia as an alternative to actually purchasing them. That would certainly have significant repurcussions within the travel sector given the size and influence that organisations such as Expedia and Amadeus currently have within the Travel sector at the present time.

Again a hat tip to the Mediavest PPC Search Marketing team here – but they noticed an interesting addition to the paid search results here for a search for bespoke furniture manufacturer Neville Johnson.

As you can see from the image above the Google products microformat data is now being pulled through into the paid search ad, thereby giving browsers to see the feedback of the vendor from the paid search ad. Givent he promimence again of this on the Google SERPs, this is again an interesting development within the search pages, and one that will again highlight the importance of getting your paid search and organic search campaigns very tight collaboratively.

Thus far this has only been triggered through the Ad Preview tool, and would not appear to be out “in the wild” as yet.

Note: Further to a response from Google, this is currently only being trialled in the US and is only triggered on products with reviews of 4 and more.