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.

A couple of the team at Mediavest Search Marketing team noticed a new feature being tested by Google with regards to paid search ads:

According to feedback from Google:

• The feature is currently in beta
• This feature will display additional ads for related queries of the users original query
• This is triggered for advertisers with relevant broad match keywords – and provide them with another opportunity to reach their target audience
• These headers are related commercial refinements and are part of an experiment we are conducting and are based on common user refinements for queries taking both search and ads signals into account
• Ads that appear under these refinement headers are targeted based on relevant broad match keywords in an advertiser’s account.
• The ads are entering into the auction and so will be charged according to the standard CPC auction model if a user clicks on one of the ads.

We have seen a number of improvements over recent years through the organic search results which take into account behavioural impacts, thus really such tweaks to the paid search results probably shouldn’t come as a significant surprise. Further to that the potential for increased revenues for Google should also be considered here both from increased click volume and from potential increases in CPC.

Its another one of Google’s worst kept secrets, however Google Real Estate has now officially launched in the UK. Many organisations have been already been preparing feeds and submitting these to Google in anticipation of this launching in the UK following successful trials in both the US and Australia.

Initial launch partners include Countrywide, the UK’s largest estate agency with a portfolio including Bairstow Eves, Bridgfords and Sotherby’s Inernational, and Spicer Haart. Deals have also been struck with online-only players including Zoopla, which acquired Property Finder from News International and Thinkproperty.com from Guardian Media Group last year, Trinity Mirror’s Zoomf and SmartNewHomes, Vebra, Property Pal and Ezylet and one would only suggest its a matter of time before other player such as new homes builder Barratt and Redrow enter the fray.

Google will monetise real estate by the sale of ‘real estate’ (ads) above and below the search results, and will not directly monetise the addition of properties to the system – although one has to wonder how long that will last given the sales models of similar ventures such as Rightmove.

Further to that it will be interesting to see how Rightmove react to the launch of Google Real Estate, particularly as this would appear to be a direct competitor of theirs, coupled with its tight integration into the Google framework.

If you are looking to take advantage of Google real estate, this can be done a number of ways namely via Google Base directly or via the Base API

Its been a while since we last did a purely paid search post here on Holistic Search however I thought it about time to break that trend particuilarly given the news that Google are launching Adwords Campaign Experiments or ACE Beta to its friends. The tool will help you optimize your account by letting you accurately test and measure changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups and placements for your Adwords accounts.

As the Adwords launch post said

In the past, the most common way to measure how changes to your account affected your campaign performance was to measure how the campaign performed before and after you implemented your changes. However, this type of analysis can often be complicated by events that occur during the test period, including holidays, weekends, or changes to end user or advertiser behavior.

ACE allows you to perform faster, more accurate tests by executing your experimental campaign alongside your original campaign. By performing this type of simultaneous split test, we can tell you precisely if your campaign changes produce statistically significant results.

The new tool can be used in a number of ways including:

• Measure the incremental impact of adding keywords to your campaign
• Measuring the impact of changing keyword or ad-group level bids in your campaign
• Measuring the value of restructuring your Content campaigns to use more tightly themed ad groups
• The impact of changing match types – particularly important given the recent changes to match types

Given the amount of changes we often see associated with organic search results its good to see such features rolled out across the paid search network. Whether or not this provides tangible learnings or ‘pinch of salt’ information is still to be seen however further information will be found here shortly

Its that time of the month ago – when Manchester SEO looms large.

Last months event went brilliantly, however not wanting to tempt fate once too often we are going back indoors this month at Dimitris, which should cater for all SEO’s not just those who like a drink or five (Ryan/Gareth – not looking at you here )

Dimitri’s is located on Deansgate, just opposite the Hilton Hotel (you know, that tall building). Their wonderfully designed site (www.dimitris.co.uk) has drinks, snacks and food menus available.

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To confirm
Date: 24th June 2010
Time: 6:30 onwards
Location: Dimitris.

We may have the likes of @sarahcarling and @seoidiot coming this time (if they keep to their words) and should be a good turnout. See you all there

Us brits have moaned a lot about Google’s lack of intelligence when it comes to Geo-Targeted results particularly with an influx of Australian, Canadian and US results.

However I noticed Google themselves appear to have a little ‘Geo-targeting’ issue of their own. Notice the first sitelink from a search for ‘webmaster tools‘ below

It would appear the sitelink for the Removal request page would appear to be a bit awry at the minute with a Slovakian result ‘Sprievodca stavom lokality’ appearing for the initial sitelink rather than an English result.

Some retargeting work required me thinks….

Its been on the horizon for a while, however Google officially announced yesterday the completion of Caffeine. Caffeine has long been talked about within SEO circles, however this should put an end to rumours of rollout on various forums and blogs

According to the official announcement:

• Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index
• Largest collection of content collected by Google.
• Net result is much faster indexation than previous
• Unlike the old index where the main index layer would be indexed every couple of weeks, meaning there was a significant delay between ‘go-live’ and when it was made available via the resultset. The new index analyses continually in smaller bitesize chunks, adding content straight into the index
• Further to this, it has been ‘future-proofed’ with scalability in mind. According to the announcement further announcements should be expected soon.

Similar to Big Daddy, this could be a significant shift from Google. Like Big Daddy, this is an infrastructural change (rather than an algorithmic change), Unlike Big Daddy this is more about capturing more of the web (and quicker) however one might suggest both have been brought about by short comings with the amount of data being able to be processed.

I would also suggest we are likely to see a number of tweaks and changes over the coming months as full rollout is tested in a fully live environment – however this could make for interesting times for SEO’s like you and me as we get to grips with the full capabilities and limitations of the new framework.

Received this corker from a potential link partner this afternoon by the name of Jack Loury

Dear http://www.holisticsearch.co.uk

We have highlighted your site as a great resource and we have a client in a related industry to you that is looking to donate money towards linking opportunities

What is the process for setting up a link on your site?
I look forward to your response and working with you in the future as a partner.

Kind Regards
Jack Loury

Now there are a number of issues with the above approach not least that it is against Googles guidelines, but lets take that as a given however it also does the following

• Addresses me as http://www.holisticsearch.co.uk. Without being funny it would not have taken five minutes to put together a more personal approach and one that addressed me in person (FYI Jack – if thats your name – look at the post author of this post and you may just find out who I am)
• Talks about donations. Lets cut to the chase, you are after advertising on my site, text or otherwise. Just be honest…..
• The email tells me nothing really about what they want, but wafts round the issue as a whole.  If I don’t know what you want, how can I tell you if I’m interested

Needless to say, the approach above was declined, but things could (not saying would) have been so much different with just a little bit of work….

I read with interest a number of posts published by Malcolm Coles following Matt Cutts interview over at Digital Inspiration. In the interview a number of points came out of particular interest:

• Google would appear to be penalising/considering penalising high authority sites who have offered links in exchange for cash. This was further to the recent incidents pertaining to the Express.
• Nofollow links should all contain nofollow.
• Fresh Content isn’t a ranking factor
• Guest Blogging isnt actively encouraged – rather build quality content on your own site (the usual Google rhetoric)

There are a number of issues raised during the interview – some more thought provoking than others, however one thing struck me whilst reading both the original article and Malcolms review of the events. We as web publishers appear to have changed many of our traditional digital marketing strategies to deal with issues pertaining to the inadeqacies of the Google algorithm, and to deal with a problem that Google itself created.

Don’t get me wrong, I want my results to be clean, relevant and not tainted by unscrupulous web publishers. However it would appear we have got to the point of no return where many traditional techniques are frowned upon. Further to that there seems to be an inconsitency in the advice often provided by Google themselves in terms of best practise

Further to this, I have been very interested in the impact of recent forays by the traditional offline publications into the online arena.  The Telegraph, Johnson Press amongst others have all entered into the advertorial market and seen Google recently cracking down on these practises. However one has to sympathise with the newspapers, with significantly reduced offline revenues and the paywall/no paywall argument still raging, newspapers are still caught in a limbo situation. Further to this, such advertorial opportunities are the mainstay of many offline publications and this would to a certain degree appear to be a natural extention of those offline offerings.

However there has been a backlash both from certain sections of the SEO community and from Google itself. However one has to ask yourself how and where we go from here. The link is now a commoditised, and more and more webmasters are aware of not just the value of a link in terms of SEO but increasingly of the financial remuneration that can by webmasters willing to offer paid advertising on their sites. Further to that, this isnt a problem that we made, unfortunately this is a problem Google themselves are responsible for having made links such a fundamental part of their current and previous algorithms. Add to that the increasing popularity of SEO as an integral part of many organisations marketing frameworks, and all of the sudden you have  a hotpot where there is an increasing priority for your site to be number one, and a decreasing opportunity to deploy unpaid and ethical resources to acquire recommendations/references/citations to your site within existing quality guidelines.

I thus can’t help thinking (and this is already happening), that Google need to move away from what has been the focal aspect of their algorithm almost since day 1.  Where else have the rules of an entire platform been almost single handedly rewritten for one participant, albeit a very big one.  However that would appear to be the route we are taking, with Google increasingly dictating the way we act and react with the web.

Is it time thus for us to stop working our entire web framework around the requirement of one singular search engine and instead push Google to find a solution to a problem all of their own making? However looking at respected sites such as David Naylors tackling this issue already, it would seem that this is a problem already having far reaching impacts

[This article is the thoughts of Peter Young solely and do not necessarily reflect those of his employers]

For those that missed it, Yandex yesterday announced it was opening up the ability to search foreign sites only something which was previously not possible on the Russian search engine. According to the press release from Yandex yesterday

Yandex offers its users an option of limiting their search only to foreign websites. To search in English or other Latin alphabet-based languages on yandex.ru, users can enable the global search filter and see results exclusively from the foreign web resources. The global search is also available at the company’s experimental www.yandex.com launched for testing new search algorithms.

Yandex has been indexing foreign websites and adding global content to its search results for two years already. According to Yandex’s analysts, web users in Russia look for, first and foremost, locally relevant information in their own language, with foreign websites being only an extension to local search results. However, it may happen so that the user wants to receive an answer specifically from a foreign website. Yandex can now satisfy this need in only one click.

So, the search query [beatles] on yandex.ru returns a long list of websites in Russian, with foreign resources only few and far between. But with the global search filter enabled, the results lead exclusively to foreign web resources. By default, Yandex search prioritizes local websites as before

User queries in one of the Latin-alphabet based languages total to 12-15% of all searches on Yandex. But not every foreign language query automatically requires limiting search specifically to foreign content. The product name of some gadget more often than not signals the user’s intention to buy this model close to their home or read feedback from other local users. To meet this demand, Yandex’s search results page now has the option to view either local or foreign search results separately.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share

Yandex has long since been a player within the Russian market, with around 45% marketshare over the course of the last year or so – however this steps marks a big step forward in terms of expansion into the global search market. I am personally of the opinion the Russian search giant is by no means a Google Killer as previous entrants to the Global market have been deemed – however I would add they are a viable competitor to smaller operators within the search space – particularly given the feedback from many esteemed search marketeers within the SEO establishment such as :

I keep searching on http://www.yandex.com and keep being impressed. Can’t believe how relevant, spam-free and useful their results are.
Rand Fishkin – EOMoz

Is Yandex (just launched in English) better than Google? It certainly looks better than Bing: http://bit.ly/9Bj0IT
Will Critchlow – Distilled

I’ve had some pretty positive results. Short & longtail. I’ve also seen some awful drops. Seems to
Ingo Bousa – Guava

Others have been less positive

I think it’s because it’s just “global” results. It doesn’t seem very good at short-tail queries, and it’s worse at long-tail
Dave Peiris - SharkSEO

Initial analysis of the Yandex resultset would certainly suggest a much lower prominence on off-page factors than say Google in particular with the following elements of particular focus:

• Use of keyword in the domain
• Use of keywords within page names
• Title Tags
• Use of keyword on-page

As I said earlier, I personally am of the opinion that by no means a viable competitor to Google in the short to medium term. One only has to look at their Russian marketshare above to see that Google already has a stable foothold in the Russian market, however should Yandex continue to push any global presence they may well become a viable alternative to the likes of Bing and Yahoo.

For those attending the SMX Conference in London, you will already be aware of the delights a London SEO night has to offer, however not many of you may be aware of the Manchester SEO nights which happen on a monthly basis. This month, we will be meeting at Dukes 92, down in Castlefield.

Given the fact we are looking at better weather (touch wood), this should be a great chance to enjoy networking with fellow SEO professionals from the Manchester and NW SEO community.

For those not familiar with Manchester, Dukes 92 can be found here:
18 – 25 Castle Street
Castlefield
Manchester M3 4LZ

info@dukes92.com

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To confirm:

Date: 27th May 2010 (officially) from 7 onwards

Place: Dukes 92, Manchester

As usual if you are interested in sponsoring the event, or would like to know further details please let me know

SEO used to be very community based, and to a certain degree still is. Its something I guess you could argue is very symbolic of the SEO community as a whole and something that differentiates us a lot from other marketing channels – and perhaps something more akin to ‘the techies’. So who and where are the big communities here in the UK and how can you find them

Manchester SEO
These have been running for around seven months, and started initially by myself (Peter Young), Ben Mckay, David Towers and David Lindop. These have gone from strength to strength in recent months with a turnout of around 40 or so SEO professionals at many of the meetups.

As you would imagine from a northern meetup, alcohol is normally involved and many of the events take place at one of the many drinking establishments in the Manchester area. Similar to the London SEO meetups the Manchester SEO community were also heavily involved in the recent Sascon search marketing conference held at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester

Website: www.manchester-seo.org
Primary Contact: Peter Young
Next Meetup: 27th May 2010 @ Dukes 92.

London SEO
Rob Kerry’s (him of Ayima fame) is synonymous with the London SEO events, with many of the events often following the big SES or SMX conferences. This May is no different with the London SEO events returning thanks to some decent sponsorship from Further. Less Frequent than other similar events such as the Manchester SEO events but read nothing into that. These events normally have a face or three you will know and a heck of a lot of alcohol

Website: www.londonseo.org
Primary Contact: Rob Kerry
Next Meetup: 18th May 2010 @ Shakespeares Head, Holborn

Brighton SEO
The last Brighton SEO will be remembered for a number of reasons, not least for the ‘link scandal’ that came out from the event itself. That said, Kelvin Newman from Site Visibility is one of the reasons one of the thriving SEO locations now has a SEO community of itself. Much like the London events these don’t happen that frequently but they are usually one to remember – and why wouldnt they be with companies like iCrossing, Fresh Egg and others all based out of Brighton and its surrounding areas.
Website: TBC
Primary Contact: Kelvin Newman
Next Meetup: 18th June 2010 – Venue TBC

Further communities are springing up such as Liverpool, as we find interest in SEO increasing. Many of these are still very small however if I have forgotten your meetup above let me know and I would be more than happy to add it to the list. These will be added as well to the events calendar which will be launched later this week.

I do a lot of work with F1 Commentator James Allen, something which has allowed me to enhance my skills across a number of avenues I would not easily have access to. In particular social media has played an increasingly growing part in that strategy, not least Youtube. We have done a number of recent videos including

First flying lap of Silverstone with Martin Brundle – courtesy of James Allen
Launched: 29th April 2010
Views: 100000+

Organic traction has played an important part in driving traffic to these videos without having to rely on the paid means to drive traffic to the video and secondarily to the site itself.

1) Dont just do videos for the sake of it
This is a conundrum often associated with other factors such as SEO but its just as true with video optimisation. Rather make a couple of really good videos a month, than 10 or 15 videos of limited quality. A clear message and target audience is crucial for video success and videos created just for the sake of it are often easily spotted and usually not very successful in terms of online pickup.

2) Optimise with targeting in mind
Taking the point above, each video should have a clear focus. You wouldn’t optimise a page without knowing what keywords you are optimising it for, so why would you optimise a video any different. Before you start make sure you have a clear idea of what may drive traffic to the site, and build your campaign accordingly.

3) Think of users and pickup
Its all well and good optimising your video so that it has a great chance of automated pickup via the results – however one has to consider how potential browsers are likely to find the video. Issues such as the title and description need to be crafted to attract clickthrough – particularly the title.

Try and include your target keyword in this title where applicable and further in the description if this is feasible. Further to this try and embed your URL into the description and if possible on the video in some format. This should tie in any external seeding or access via Youtube – back with the website (using the video above – you will notice reference to both Santander and James Allen’s F1 site in the top right corner – which create a subtle but effective reference back to the source sites.

However at all times bear in mind who is going to be looking at this….

4) Don’t forget your keywords
As with any other aspect of search, keywords are crucial. I have already highlighted the importance of including keywords in the title and description however one should not forget integrating these into other areas as well, such as the tags. Don’t restrict yourself to one or two – ensure you reference any keywords which are relevant to this as well. Think long tail – go mad but don’t, don’t, don’t just include the one or two….

5) Don’t keep it to yourself
One of the most important aspects I have often found with video optimisation is to ensure we don’t merely rely on organic Youtube traffic to drive traffic to the video. To do so is incredibly naive.

One of the most effective ways of driving credibility to the site is to embed your video in your website, or other peoples website, or press releases, infact consider sources that are going to drive eyeballs. For James Allen we embed the videos on video specific posts – which are subsequently often picked up by a number of other third parties.

All these views count – and it should subsequently be noted this helps organic traction in Youtube, which can subsequently feed organic traction in the mainstream search results – all of which drive traffic to your video….

6) From small seeds, big trees do grow
Social media is a wonderful way of spreading awareness of your videos. Take for example the recent IPad Blendtec video. Whilst much of the success of recent Blendtec videos is down to the initial successes of earlier incarnations there was a real buzz when Blendtec released the latest variant to ‘celebrate’ the launch of the ipad particularly on social media sites such as Twitter.

However there are more ‘straight to market options out there, budget permitting you may want to look at:

• Homepage takeovers
• Promoted Videos
• Branded pages

Further to that services such as TubeMogul can significantly open up your online distribution. We were however focussing on organic traction so I would suggest particularly the homepage takeovers and promoted videos really anything thats likely to help raise awareness of your video to the wider public

7) Test, Learn Refine

Rome wasn’t built in a day, most people learn their trade by testing, learning, and refining their strategies based on what they have learnt. That process happens over and over again, each time ,something new tested, more lessons learned and strategies further tweaked and refined.

It should be noted like that of SEO – is that video optimisation is also a case of ticking boxes. Think of your keywords, think of your content, and think about how you are going to promote it. By doing that you have already won half the battle

The new Google search results pages have taken some getting use to – personally I am not that big a fan of them – yet.

However along with the the new design seems to have come a new feature, one that seems to be a hit and miss

As you can see , Google have introduced a ‘something different’ feature on the search pages, something which is a bit hit and miss as you can see below.

A search for SMX produces a slightly more … confusing set of suggestions

However, one area this could become interesting on is on brand searches. Similar to recent PPC changes, this would allow competitors to potentially get a foothold on competitor brand searches. Take for example this search for Mediavest:

This appears to be confined to .com searches at the minute – certainly a number of .co.uk searches didnt appear to trigger this on searches. However its one I personally don’t feel adds any significant value to the results – and in certain instances actually reduces the perceived relevance of the results (take for advantage the SMX result highlighted above).

As a sidenote it does serve to highlight potentially how Google groups keywords with regards to keyword evaluation.

It feels like only yesterday that we saw Google take a significant step forward in terms of the Webmaster Tools reporting functionality when they introduced the clickthrough information through the service. That has had a mixed reception from the industry, with the validity of the reported data being the main sticking point.

Today, Google have announced yet further additions to the service, including

• Changing ‘Top Search Queries’ to ‘Search Queries’
• Addition of Average position column
• Addition of starred tab – for easier access to starred results
• Now showing a “Displaying” number for Impressions and Clicks

The final point would appear to require further details with Google adding

This number represents a total count of the data displayed in the Search Queries table. The number in bold appearing just above it is a total count of all queries including the “long tail” of queries which are not displayed in the Search Queries table. When the “Displaying” number is not visible, such as when you select a specific country from the “All countries” drop-down menu, then the bold number is the total count of the data displayed in the Search Queries table.

This average position functionality has also been added to the downloadable documents.

It should be noted that this doesn’t represent a significant addition to the framework, and feels rather more like a tweak. With much of the focus still on the integrity of the data, I still think there is some work to do before we can really take this serious as a day to day tool – however it is good to see Google still putting resource behind this – rather than letting it go the same way as Buzz/Wave et al. However until this data is something we can trust its going to be nothing more than a gimmick rather than what could be a hugely useful business tool.

The official Google announcement can be found here

I seem to have actually missed this one by a couple of days but its still a feature that could change the way many local hotel optimisers approach their local optimisation campaigns

I was looking at a number of local searches and noticed some ‘new’ features at the bottom of the the local listings which allowed me as the browser to view more specific results. These included

• Types – 5 star, boutique, 4 star etc
• Hotel near +locations

This could potentially have a significant impact on traditional mainstay searches such as those for ‘hotels in x’ type phrases – particularly given the nature of how some people search for hotels. Currently search trends in these sectors is heavily biased towards ‘x hotels’ or ‘hotels in x’ type searches which has traditional served advertisers appearing in these results fairly well.

However with browsers now able to dissect their search even more, secondary (or longer tail) results could now see a significant uplift in traction. I would also suggest we are likely to see further refinement of these features as one can’t rule out the price sensitive nature of the industry, and this is one of the features advertisers can provide via the Places functionality.

Note: My initial suggestion this may be limited to just hotels would appear to be wrong, further tests on restaurants has also resulted in similar functionality

Let us know if you see more

The Americans have had this for ages, however according to Greg Sterling, this would now appear to be on its way to the UK

Greg however wasn’t able to recreate this however if you type ‘liposelection london’ into Google the entry in question appears as the second result. Click into the entry and you will see the following

I can’t help but think this has been far too late coming particularly given other entrants to the market that have long since established themselves in the UK market – such as myvouchercodes etc. That said this is Google and they do occupy a huge percentage of the UK search market.

I haven’t seen more widespread usage of this – however this may well be one to keep an eye on…

Bing has been on a major push over the last couple of months promoting the Bing decision engine as a viable alternative to Google. Fellow professionals appear to have taken a Marmite stance to Bing, some love it, others hate it myself – I would have to unfortunately sit myself still in Camp Google.

Some of this may be done to familiarity with Google. It gives me what I want, when I want and often how I want. Take for example the snippet below

Compare this against similar results on Google and there is a stark difference between the two, and something that in my opinion highlights very well the differences in quality of results between the two search engines. The Google search results provide far more disclosure and relevancy than the Bing results do – something which I feel the addition of Microformats to the Google armoury will continue to provide this usability advantage to the likes of Google over Bing and to a lesser extent Yahoo.

However that said I do like the potential of Bing. Searches such as ‘plasma tv’ highlight they are able to pull similar content elements out to Google. There are a number of nice touches to the interface but one has to feel they still have a long way to go before the Bing system is as intuitive and/or powerful as that of Google. However, this was always a long term project for Microsoft, their first objective was to beat Yahoo – something they achieved before the proposed timescales – and the deal with Yahoo has allowed them to now focus exclusively on taking that market share from Google.

The new bout of advertising is going to draw some people to Bing, however there is no doubting that the major factor to change search engines will be relevancy and usability. Dom Hodgson from Think Visibility put this very well recently at the Sascon Search Marketing and Social Media Conference when he highlighted many people try Bing but go back to Google as they are used to using it.

It would appear breaking this type of behaviour is going to be the hardest to do…

Malcolm Coles posted this yesterday on his blog – however I was very interested to see the addition of ‘brand links’ to the Google.com search results pages. Certainly it would appear to add yet further weight to many theories surrounding Google’s support for brands within the SERPS.

Some initial analysis is this a fairly controlled rollout, and affects product related terms in particular. Terms such as football club, hotels and a number of other failed to return any reference to brands as part of the search – however one can’t help thinking this may be rolled out once the status quo has been established via initial testing

Some of my initial theories as to factors for inclusion were search volumes however some initial analysis would suggest this is a limited factor. Take for example golf clubs below:

Run the term as golf clubs through the keyword tool, and the following results are displayed (tried this both US and UK – and exact + broad/phrase/exact)

As you can see other brands such as Mizuno and Wilson are prominent terms in terms of search volumes however have not been included within the options available at the top. Within the American Market, the Teitlest brand was also one that had significant traction in terms of searches on this term -yet wasn’t included in the recommended brand results.

Further to this, Google do use other sources for data in other tools at their disposal – ie Comscore etc. This would thus suggest that Google may use also use this data within their evaluation prior to inclusion. There is also the likelihood of human manipulation which can’t be excluded….

One has to suggest in its current format, potential impact on SME’s could be limited. Certainly the majority of the terms tested above have established markets with a very small number of new entrants to the market, however it is not inconceivable that Google will roll this out to extended terms at some point in the near future. Should this move into more service based sectors, I can’t help thinking this may then start to impact significantly on smaller operators many of whom rely on organic search for a cost-effective route to market.

Further analysis is certainly required on this and I am currently looking at overlaying this data across a number of the ASP’s over the coming weeks – with the post obviously to follow.

Its one of the worst kept secrets in search, but Google has announced today a number of changes to the way it deals with agencies, unsuprising giving the way the market has evolved significantly over the last couple of years.

Further to this. Google have taken feedback from a number of agencies in terms of both qualifications and working practises and announced a number of improvements to the framework including

• More indepth knowledge required for qualification
• Release of a new ‘Adwords Certified Partner qualification’
• Qualified Partners directory
• Preferred Adwords API Pricing

In particular the qualifications are something which many organisations will be scrambling to achieve over the coming months, particularly given the commercial benefits of a Google backed partners directory.  The more challenging and rigorous process of qualification may also help to raise the profile of the accreditation as a trusted mark of whether a potential partner is any kop or not.

The new certification program will provide agencies and their employees with more up-to-date, comprehensive, strategy-focused training and certification on the latest tools and best practices for managing AdWords accounts, including:

• New training materials to help agencies better understand recent changes in search marketing and AdWords functionality, available via webinar series, learning center, or on-site training at Google
• More challenging certification exams to test practical application of knowledge and best practices (rather than simple recall of knowledge)
• Advanced-level exams to highlight competency in search, display, reporting and analysis

Further to this, agencies which achieve the qualification can opt-in to the partners directory which will allow prospective clients to view potential agency partners who have achieved partner status.

Finally partners will also be able to benefit from reduced API pricing, something which is likely to benefit potentially the larger agencies but something which all the same will benefit both small and large agencies alike.

To find out more, please visit the officialGoogle announcement

For those of you who don’t know, this Wednesday sees the very first Sascon conference taking place at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. For the conference we (Richard Gregory – Latitude, Simon Wharton – Pushon, Ben McKay – MediaEdge CIA, Richard Hudson – Vanilla Storm, Nicky Wake – Dont Panic Projects and Peter Cobley – ISpy) have pulled together some of the best speakers in the UK and Europe to discuss a range of issues across search engine optimisation, paid search, analytics and social media – with a range of client and agency side speakers.

I am lucky enough to be moderating the Advanced Link Building panel with a number of recognised leaders in the field on the panel including

• Kristjan Mar Hauksson – Nordic eMarketing
• Joost De Valk – Orange Valley
• Neil Walker – Just Search
• Richard Baxter – SEOMoz/SEO Gadget
• Fantomaster (Ralph Tegtmeier) – Fantomaster.com

It should be an absolutely brilliant panel – and we are looking for questions to ask our panellists during the panel. If you would like us to ask your question at the event please drop it below and we will choose the best to ask our panellists. For those attending the event there will be a Q & A at the end of the panel for you to ask your questions as well.

I saw this one come through a couple of days ago – however its always interesting seeing Matt (Cutts) respond to these questions. Its something I think he does very well and something that I think in turn allows him to just about keep his ‘one of us’ tag.

In the latest of the series of Google videos on YouTube Matt answers the question, “how many search algorithm changes were made in 2009?” In response to that question, Matt made the following points

• Google likely makes roughly a change per day to the search algorithm.
• They don’t necessarily release those changes each day, but they will release them in batches.
• In 2009, they probably had between 350 to 400 or so changed to the search algorithm.
• These changes could include how they ‘segment a language’ or a tweak to Synonyms

It should be noted that Matt does mention a couple of examples in the video, and I would particularly draw note to the examples he used. These aren’t massive changes but often subtle behind the scenes changes that potentially a number of users wouldn’t even notice. Thus these 350-400 changes won’t all affect your day to day optimisation.

It does however highlight the level of potential flux that could exist within the algorithm itself and thus the changeable nature of the search engine results.