SEO Blog - Internet Marketing News

I expect by now most people have heard about Google’s launch of its new web browser Google Chrome yesterday. Rather than talk about Google Chrome itself (as it has been very well covered already), I’ve taken a look at how Google are promoting this to encourage users to download and try out the new browser.

Google.com & Google.co.uk
Both Google.co.uk and Google.com have download messages on their homepages.

Google AdWords keyword bidding
Google Chrome is the top sponsored link listing for queries on both “Browser” and “Web browser”.

Google Organic SERPs
www.google.com/chrome is currently ranking at #70 for “Web Browser”, although this is currently outside the top 100 for “browser”. Both searches feature several articles about yesterday’s launch and interestingly Internet Explorer does not rank in the top 100 for either term!

Promotion Google Content
Google already has a large amount of content indexed which is relevant to or mentions Google Chrome:
site:google.com google chrome = 99,200 Results
site:google.co.uk google chrome = 299 Results
site:google.com download “google chrome” = 882 Results

Google Universal Search
Several Google Chrome news articles are also appearing as a universal search result for relevant queries, such as browser, web browser, Google and Google Chrome. With just the 2349 related articles so far, told you it was well covered!

Google News
Not promoted directly, but the launch of Google Chrome is currently a story featured on the homepage of Google News.

Google Video
Again, this is indirectly promoted but a Google Chrome video (from YouTube, top-right) is currently active on the homepage of Google Video.

Have you seen this promoted anywhere else? I would assume this is something Google have big plans to continue pushing, looking to obtain additional users from services such as GMail, Google Documents, Google AdWords/AdSense/Analytics etc.

A common question we’re asked by clients is how can they improve their rankings for Google Maps local searches?

Having analysed many listings, in my opinion the main factors to Google Maps listings in the UK are as follows:

• 1) Proximity to location - The closer your registered business address is in distance to the centre of a town or city, the more relevant Google will find your listing to a locational search.
• 2) Keywords within company name - Using product/service keywords within a business name appears to be a very important factor towards obtaining an improved Google Maps ranking.
• 3) Categories selected - Being listed in a relevant or closely related category to a keyword can make an impact. Keeping the number of categories selected concise should also improve the likelihood of being listed for relevant searches.
• 4) Local telephone numbers - This may be coincidental, but I’ve noticed local telephone numbers such as 01865 (Oxford) appear to outrank listings which use 0845 style of numbers. I’ve just updated the SEOptimise listing so will test this out.
• 5) Having a full profile/reviews - Listings which use images, descriptions and contain reviews generally appear to rank well in Google Maps. A high number of positive reviews is also likely to have an influence.
• 6) Locational information on website - Ensuring your website address details correspond with the companies Google Maps listing.
• 7) Strong SEO - This doesn’t appear to be of high importance at the moment, but as the Google Maps algorithm develops we may see the relevancy and quality of a website’s content and link popularity becoming a major factor.

If you’re feeling sneaky you could always add a slightly inacurrate business name, so that it contains important keywords, and register a PO Box address located in the centre of your city!

In Dragons Den last night Clive Billing turned around what initially looked like a pretty average pitch into a £255,000 offer for 40% of his business, online diamond website diamondgeezer.com.

How did he do this? By announcing that he ranked in Google at #12 for diamond and #9 for diamond engagement rings. Although he probably wouldn’t have got much further had the dragons searched for this themselves, realising that the site had dramatically plummeted to outside the top 100!

Amazingly Clive turned down the offer, but by revealing the high turnover figures of his largest competitor (bluenile.co.uk), the dragons saw the potential these search rankings have towards generating high volumes of online sales and as a result immediately adding value to the business.

Please feel free to link back to this post using the anchor text “diamond” or “diamond engagement ring”!

Earlier today the new search engine Cuil was officially launched. While it’s obviously got a long way to get anywhere near competing with Google what I find interesting is that it’s been developed by former Google engineers and that it “ranks pages by content, rather than popularity”.

This means that rather than ranking a page based upon the quality of it’s backlinks, Cuil will list the webpage’s which it’s algorithm feel are well-optimised towards a specific query. This probably isn’t great news for Cuil itself (as many well-optimised but untrusted websites will rank highly in it’s search results) but I would imagine a lot of the same on-site optimisation factors which are relevant in Google have also been applied to Cuil.

This could make Cuil a very useful indicator of how effective your on-site SEO will be in Google. For example, a search for SEO will display websites containing relevant content as opposed to the trusted authority domains ranking in Google:

Providing domain for sale websites in the SERP’s such as seo.co.nz doesn’t really provide users with the results they are looking for, but it does show that using the targeted keywords within title tags, h1 headings and paragraph tags works as an effective method of on-site SEO.

So while there are already many opinions from about Cuil (both positive and negative), perhaps it should be taken seriously by SEO’s to help reassure yourself that a site’s content is well-optimised and heading in the right direction!

Over the last couple of weeks many people have noticed several ranking changes in Google.co.uk. Reports so far suggest that the Google algorithm is currently favouring .co.uk domains over .com and other top-level domains.

Is this a positive change?
Recently Google have appeared to be moving away from heavily relying on TLD information and trusting a wider range of factors in order to assess a website’s geographical location, so the algorthim update seems quite surprising. In my opinion the new rankings would reduce the relevancy of Google UK listings as many high-quality, non .co.uk domains may be replaced by weaker .co.uk websites.

We’ll be keeping an eye on how this progresses as the flucations in Google UK probably haven’t finished just yet. I’d expect to see this even out a bit more during July, but it does go to show you can’t always predict what Google’s going to do next!

Last week Google launched Google Trends for Websites, I haven’t experimented with this too much yet but it looks like a great tool to compare website traffic.

Anyway, I’ve just done a quick search on SEOptimise and was surprised to see the Google Trends result appearing at #4:

As far as I’m aware there are no inbound links pointing to this page (other than the nofollowed one I just created above) so I’m unsure why this has even been indexed let alone ranking well.

Looking deeper and we’re not the only ones, websites such as Bruce Clay, Keyword Discovery and High Rankings have also been indexed along with 2,720 others, with Google Trends ranking well for searches such as bruceclay.com and highrankings.com.

The authority and strength of the Google.com domain means they are likely to rank well for most of the brand names indexed, just ask Rob Kerry! So it will be interesting to hear if this is a mistake by Google or if they actually intended on indexing the website URL’s, not sure if they need the extra traffic though!

Update: David Eaves also noticed the same thing happening, with a few more examples on his blog.

During the last few weeks website localisation and internationalisation seem to be a hot topic around the blogosphere.

Domain management for multinational websites is a very important SEO factor to consider, this ensures you maximise the amount of referred local search traffic whilst applying the most effective strategy overall. There are several different approaches which can be taken to manage country-specific content, I’ve taken a look at how many big brands combat this issue below.

Country Specific TLD - Amazon

Amazon are a great example of how to manage domain internationalisation issues by using a country-specific top-level domain (TLD) for the UK website. This separates content for UK (www.amazon.co.uk) and US (www.amazon.com) audiences, while still maintaining excellent rankings across Google global and UK search engines. This is carefully structured to ensure that there are no major duplicate content issues which may harm Amazon’s rankings.

Subdomain - Yahoo!

Yahoo! take a different approach by using the subdomain uk.yahoo.com which is recognised as a UK website. Using a subdomain is a method which may be more suitable for smaller websites. This is because they may not be powerful enough to use multiple TLD’s, benefiting from consolidating all inbound links into a single domain strategy. This shouldn’t be an issue if you’re the size of Yahoo though!

Subfolder - Microsoft

Microsoft used to miss out on a large percentage of Google UK traffic due to their domain strategy, this is because they use a .com hosted in the US which meant they weren’t being indexed for UK filter queries. The hosting hasn’t actually changed but other factors seem to have been triggered which means they are now indexed for a pages from the UK Google search. A possible reason could be because www.microsoft.co.uk redirects to the /en/gb/ subfolder which may have triggered a locational filter in the algorithm, Microsoft may have also set themselves a UK geographical location for the subsite URL in Google Webmaster Central. While this method has worked well, for the average website I would recommend having at least one of either a UK server location or a .co.uk domain to ensure indexing in Google UK (UK filter search).

.com TLD, Hosted in Target Country - Tesco

Tesco are slightly different to the above sites, being that they are only targeting the UK as opposed to multiple countries. However, because they use a .com TLD Tesco need to ensure Google are aware this is a UK based website and this is achieved by having their web hosting geographically located in the UK. Tesco are also in a position where they could easily add additional locational sections of the website in the future by using a subdomain, subfolder or country-specific TLD.

All of the Above! - IMDB

IMDB seem to take several of these approaches, by using imdb.com for main website in addition to www.imdb.co.uk and the subdomain’s uk.imdb.com and us.imdb.com. This is an extreme over-usage of unnecessary extra subsites and also confuses the search engines by creating a duplicate content issue. The ideal approach here would be to scrap the subdomain’s entirely, either using the .co.uk containing content with a UK focus, or host the domain in the UK and manage all content underneath the same version on imdb.com.

None of the Above - Apple

As noticed by Duncan Morris, instead of applying an SEO strategy to target Google “pages from the UK” search traffic, Apple have instead ignored this and must spend thousands of pounds bidding for it’s brand and product keywords on Google AdWords instead. They’ve also let someone else pick-up apple.co.uk instead of paying the £2.99 registration fee!

Overall
There is no “one-fits all” internationalisation strategy suitable for all websites, the selected approach will depend largely upon the main target audience. However, there are certain things you can look to avoid to ensure you’re not reducing the strength of your website with duplicate content or missing out on potential traffic in countries which are important to your business.

And they’re off… Again. More soap opera and cynicism erupts from three of the top performing search engines as Yahoo! sheds executives almost as fast as share value and Microsoft grumbles about Google being “anti-competitive”. Who needs WWE when you have giants like this wrestling each day?

Last week, Yahoo! lost even more top executives; Joshua Schachter (he of Delicious origin) and Brad Garlinghouse – this follows recent announcements from Caterina Fake and Steward Butterfield (of Flickr foundings), as well as search advertising exec Qi Lu and senior vice-president of search Vish Makhijani.

These names may mean little to anyone who does not follow the search scene but one thing which should be pretty obvious is that such a brain drain happening so quickly is unlikely to bode well for the engine. I would go so far as to say that Yahoo! is breaking apart and - without fast action soon - could lose its edge and its long-secure place as the world’s second most popular search engine.

It interests me, however, that the disintegration of Yahoo! is not being caused by any drop off in search engine figures. The number of people using search engines rises steadily; if Yahoo! ceases to be a main portal then MSN and Google will mop up their traffic. Search tools remain the best way for consumers to find their way around the web and if Yahoo! breaks, it will be as a result of self-destruction.

Recently Ciaran Norris wrote a thorough piece on how the Guardian basically denounces SEO as scams and fails to grasp the whole concept of it, while facing the Google monopoly with all it’s ramifications. I took a closer look just to discover what the problem with search engine optimisation and the Guardian is: According to an article published at their own website the Guardian is not the leading UK online newspaper anymore. The Telegraph has outpaced them due to “hard technical work, SEO and increasing editorial content by as much as 50%”. As we know in the SEO industry content is still king and combined with proper SEO it can make a difference. So no wonder that the Telegraph managed to increase it’s traffic by 153.4%.

“To me it shows that some people high up in the publishing hierarchy are still stuck in the past, have a superficial expertise if at all in online publishing and blame a whole industry for their own failure.”

The folks at the Guardian better face reality and hire a solid SEO company. Newspapers are not bought solely on newstands anymore they are found via Google and read online for years now. If the Guardian is too slow to adapt they must face the responsibility themselves and stop badmouthing the SEO industry for their own lack of understanding of the new media environment.

It seems that most other established UK newspapers by now have grasped the concept of SEO with the exception of the Guardian. I already cited the The Times article predicting a huge SEO boom in the near future. The Independent has covered SEO only in a single a paragraph last year but the article was a sound one. Indeed The Guardian itself published a primer on SEO, as Ciaran correctly notices, and it was not only about scams. So it seems that it’s not The Guardian as whole but just an incompetent individual.

It’s a strange coincidence though that the publication of the outstanding SEO results of The Telegraph is followed by the denouncement of “SEO scams” by the Guardian a few days later.

Google has expanded its share of the UK market even further, managing to attract an incredible 87 per cent of visits in May alone, new research shows.

Analysis published by Hitwise has shown that, while Google properties accounted for a substantial 68 per cent of all US searches last month, the search behemoth was responsible for almost nine in ten UK queries.

This represents an increase of 12 per cent on last year’s healthy figures. Google really is the search engine of choice for Brits – and here in the UK, we make an astounding number of searches. In April alone, UK consumers made more than 4.1 billion searches, according to comScore research.

Now, to me and many others, this suggests (Continue Reading…)