Continuing our coverage of April’s BrightonSEO, here’s a write-up of ‘Microformats and SEO’: a talk given by Glenn Jones, a founder and director of Madgex. His slides are available here.
Search engines are interested in getting structured data from websites for better user experience in searching. Google uses them for rich snippets in the search results, to show things like ratings and author pictures.
I was in the process of performing an overall account-level audit on a client AdWords account; keyword research – or keyword auditing – was an integral part of this process. I am aware that there are a number of posts covering this very topic in a number of different perspectives. But I thought I’d share with you my method when performing keyword research on a fairly mature account. Also, please note that my client operates within a niche B2B market and to a certain extent, within an oligopoly. If the business operates within a fairly specialised sector like my client, then it would be a good idea to get your client involved in the keyword research process as well. This is so that you could tap into their expertise about what they sell, and what keywords matter to them. This is a two way process, so at times, the client may propose keywords that may require your critical analysis and recommendations. For example, what does “asset management” mean? Are you referring to the process of protecting your assets? Or are you referring to “asset management” within the financial industry? If your client’s core competence is in asset protection and security, is it still worth competing for this keyword even though competition will be extremely fierce? Discuss this with your client and decide on next course of action.
Doing a few queries this morning, I’ve noticed a range of local sites being listed in Google alongside the regular SERPs for generic queries. Digging a bit deeper, this looks like much more than a personalised search feature, in fact Google seem to be emphasising local websites very heavily for competitive queries when completely logged out too.
Google have announced this week that they have applied 40 algorithm updates in Feb, with the Google Venice update rollout affecting local. So I’ve tested this out by performing the following queries in Incognito mode in Chrome – so hopefully this will restrict the amount of personalisation that is going on here. But Google does know my location – which is automatically set as Oxford. So I’ve compared the set of results for a range of queries – and have changed my location settings, from the automatic selection of Oxford – comparing this with Manchester.
Earlier in the week Google announced changes to its privacy policies. The main changes are that:
Google still promises not to sell personal data, but to only share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information. It hasn’t announced that it’s collecting information it wasn’t before, just that it’s combining what it has differently. You can preview the new policy here.
According to Forbes, combining information between Google services has been allowed by the privacy policies since 2005. But this didn’t stop the FTC complaining of privacy policy violations when Google used data from Gmail accounts when launching Google Buzz in 2010 – Google’s policy at the time also said “If we use this [personal] information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.” The new policy instead says “We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.” Still, the FTC complaint may be a factor in why Google is trying to be very clear to its users about what it’s doing with their data, as it starts to treat all of its products as parts of a single unified service.
And now, some speculation on what this may or may not mean for PPC and SEO:
The recent integration of social and search at Google marks a huge change in how information on the internet will be presented to us. When a logged in user now performs a search, they will be given two types of search results: the anonymous search results that we are all used to and personal search results, which are generated from information shared within that user’s network of Google+ circles. This new platform presents a major marketing opportunity for brands and it requires a developed strategy just like other social media platforms. It would be daft for brands to consider Google+ as just another fad, and, in the same breadth that brands define strategies for Facebook and Twitter, the same now needs to be done for Google+.
While it is apparent that Google+ is not yet fully developed, it would appear a good time for brands to set up their Google+ page, start uploading regular content and playing about with the different features on Google+. What should you as a brand be doing now?
1. Grow Your Circles
Yesterday Google announced a new page layout algorithm update – this is a landing page quality update, which looks at “the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result”. As opposed to having the need for scrolling beneath ads to get to this. Doesn’t this sound very similar to Panda though?
At Pubcon in November last year, Matt Cutts mentioned that:
“If you have ads obscuring your content, you might want to think about it,” asking publishers to consider, “Do they see content or something else that’s distracting or annoying?”
To be honest, from my school days of using Google right up to today, the search engine giant has not once stopped impressing me. From its algorithmic updates for a better user experience to its cloud based computing services, Google has captured my life and sadly, probably my soul.
Today I will be sharing with you a collection of my favourite Google search operator queries, not only to help open your mind to the powers of Google being much more than a search engine, but also to show you that knowing some of these queries will help you become better in the art of SEO.
6 Starter Operator Search Operator Queries
These queries are particularly helpful because they’re generally quick and easy short cuts in narrowing your search results:
| Query | What does it mean? |
| “best practice seo” | Searches for this exact phrase within “” |
| mobile -phone | Inclusion of – means searches for the word mobile but nothing following after phone |
| seo ~glossary | Brings up a glossary of information regarding that word |
| define:seo | Definition of that word or phrase |
| OR / | | Returns search queries with one of the given terms |
| related: | Helps list web pages related to the URL |
In recent months, Google has made a distinct effort to publicly communicate the small changes they have been making to their algorithms. In a bid to appear more transparent, Google has published monthly updates on its blog with regard to these changes. With special attention on these updates, and taking into consideration yesterday’s big social search announcement, this post ponders the signals being sent to us around Google Image Search.
The first mention of these subtle changes came in November, when Google cited one change as:
It was during this month that Google also rolled out the +1 button to Image search. Its social media offering opens up to integrate photos, allowing +1 users to highlight favourite images. This marks the start of a personalised web experience and reinforces the growing sentiment that social and search are becoming increasingly intertwined.
Recently I’ve written about Klout score optimisation. Since then I and others who outed themselves as actively using Klout have been attacked by self proclaimed SEO stars and other people who seemingly “hate Klout”. Can you hate a metric? Obviously people get very emotional when it comes to Klout.
Klout measures the social media influence of people. While it fails at determining your real life influence, it’s quite accurate for measuring how active and influential you are on social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.
That’s why some people hate Klout: they are only influential within a small closed group, while they have never shared enough with the general public on social media to get appreciation from the masses.
What did I say when people ridiculed me for using Klout to determine people’s influence? I said that I am quite sure that Google internally has a similar system of finding out who exerts influence on the social web and who does not. It wasn’t a very daring prediction, it was just an extrapolation based on the steps Google has undertaken in the past. Google has already been focusing on authorship, real names and the social graph for a while.
Now Bill Slawski has written an article on the reputation systems Google uses, might use or will use in the future. There are three mentioned in the post. The most interesting one is the Agent Rank. Not only does the name sound familiar and self-explanatory to some extent, but it’s also a patent Google has filed. It most probably gets or will be used for Google +1 votes.
Last week I setup a Facebook poll to ask people what they considered to be the most significant change in search during 2011. This has received a great response, so here are the results so far (you can still take part on the SEOptimise fan page):
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