All posts in search

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​Google is now not the only monopolist on many search markets including the UK, but the mega-corporation is overtaking new markets, crushing the competition with more or less ruthless tactics.

Some SEO industry pundits such as Aaron Wall already advise you to prepare for a time after SEO when Google will finally keep most clicks for itself.

The tendency is already there, as some search engine result pages (SERPs) are already dominated by ads and Google-owned paid services.

I like the way a Google Panda victim has put it:

“Google Panda is the result of many years of struggle, with Google trying to eliminate go-between services like news aggregators and specialised search engines,” explains Chappaz. “Why? Because Google’s revenues for the broad search platform are slowing down. Google needs to eat in its own ecosystem to keep its revenues flowing.​

What can you do about Google entering your market and making everybody go out of business quickly?

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Just a few years ago SEO was really simple. You had to be in the top 10 or rather in the top 3 for relevant keywords. Then the traffic came and with it the leads, sales or whatever you wished. Today there is no real top 10 anymore. Even if you are at #1 in the organic search results, you might be below the “fold” so that users have to scroll to see your site on the Google search results page aka SERP.

Google has introduced so many changes to most SERPS that you can’t ignore them and go on as if it’s still 2005. You have to change your SEO strategy accordingly.

While many people already have noticed that Universal search is all over the place, and images, video or news results get displayed frequently, many still behave as if SEO was about checking rankings and aiming for #1 in organic search. These 30 Google SERP changes impact your SEO strategy in a way you can’t ignore.

If you’re already using paid search marketing, how can you improve your results? Here are nine tips for sharpening up your campaigns.

Use conversion tracking & Google Analytics
Which keywords produce what results? Which cause people to make purchases, which result in newsletter sign-ups, which drive traffic to your forum or blog? You need tracking to answer these questions. AdWords (or AdCenter) will tell you what ads searchers click, but it won’t say what they do when they get to your site.

If you don’t have any conversion tracking installed yet, then install it. AdWords and AdCenter have their own conversion tracking, which records a conversion when someone who clicked on an ad subsequently visits a page on your site with conversion tracking code. This is usually a ‘thank you’ page for a sign up, or a receipt page after a purchase – it depends on your website’s goals.

Earlier today I thought it would be interesting to find out what peoples favourite search conference in the UK is.

Update 15th Sept – the votes have started to settle down now and the top results are very interesting, with the smaller organised and 1-day events such as SAScon, Think Visibility and BrightonSEO coming out on top of conferences which are considered much higher profile.

Here’s the results, from 171 votes:

  1. SAScon Manchester – 51 votes
  2. Think Visibility Leeds – 49 votes
  3. BrightonSEO – 27 votes
  4. a4uexpo London – 19 votes
  5. SearchLove London – 15 votes
  6. SMX London – 5 votes
  7. SES London – 4 votes
  8. Conversion Conference London – 1 vote

As a self-confessed grammar geek, I’m frequently dismayed by the sloppy standard of writing I am continually confronted with throughout the course of the seven days a week I spend exploring the weird and wonderful world wide web. Whether it’s a blog post, a tweet or even a company website, it seems that a lax approach to grammar has become the norm – even, most shockingly of all, among professional copywriters I’ve hired. The most frequent offender in the huge array of rudimentary English errors is the misplaced or missing apostrophe, a grammar violation which winds me up so much that Stuart Tofts and Kevin Gibbons make a point of including one in every email they send me, just so that they can see my reaction.


Before you ask, no – “Trampoline” is not the name of the shop!

Not long ago, in a moment of above average exasperation, I sent out a tweet which said:

So imagine my satisfaction when the following correction from Google was brought to my attention not long after:

In this week’s video blog, Marcus Taylor and Dan Bianchini of SEOptimise debate the pros and cons of personalised search. Who will win the debate? Watch the video to find out!

Did you agree with Marcus and Dan’s conclusions? Let us know where you stand on the debate by leaving a comment below!

A few weeks ago Shark SEO posted an intriguing experiment about multiple meta descriptions. To be more exact, he experimented with adding more than one meta description into a single meta description tag.

One or more actual meta descriptions would exceed the meta description display character limit of approx. 165 characters. Why would you want to do it? Well, usually search users are seeking more than one aspect of your site or service. Thus it would be an advantage to serve all of them the perfect meta description.

Expanding on this concept, I wanted to test whether you can add more than one or multiple meta description tags.

I wondered whether Google would accept more than one meta description tag. Also, I wanted to find out which one it would take – the first one?

In the test performed by Shark SEO, both descriptions contained in one tag could be triggered to appear in the search snippet depending on the keyphrase used in the search query. Would it be the case here as well?

panda*

After watching the SEO industry debating the Google Panda or Content Farmer update as it was initially dubbed for weeks and now that the update has hit the UK as well I decided to compile a list of the most important resources on it.

This update seems to have hit far more SEO practicioners than average webmasters, that might be one of the reasons for the popularity of the topic.

Google itself says that 12% of search results have been impacted initially while in a survey 40% of US SEO practicioners admitted they have lost traffic in the update aftermath.

Content farmers have been hit but not all of them, the content farm that was the reason for the discussion on content farms got away unscathed. Demand Media’s eHow thrives even better than before. Why? It wasn’t really a content farms update.

It was a quality update as Google itself refers to it. Thus all kinds of sites have been affected even legit sites not following the content farm business model at all. Some of them have been reinstated after a public outcry though so it seems to be a good idea to ask your PR department for help when your rankings plummeted.

Paris: small Eiffel Tower*

These days the “content is king” and “you need great content” mantras are everywhere. While some people in the SEO industry challenge it by stating that great content is not enough, you need to push, promote or market it as well. I rarely see an article that actually explains what great content is or actually could be. Also, many sites that allegedly offer great content provide mostly big or just long content.

It seems that many content creators rely on size to measure greatness, while on the Web it’s often the other way around. The faster someone can convey a message, the greater the content.

With the latest Google update aimed at so-called content farms, we’ve seen a flurry of articles focused on content quality. This is a good start, as content farm articles are often just long without offering value. Long or even big shallow content is not enough these days. Great or quality content is the key.

I’ve been guilty of producing big content instead of great content myself here on SEOptimise. Let me explain the differences between the three common types of content you encounter on the Web today:

While everybody is talking about content farms right now, most people seem to overlook the far more important change that took place recently:  Google has incorporated social search results right into the regular ones.

Until now they displayed searches by your Twitter, FriendFeed or Google Buzz friends below the regular organic results. These changes are even more profound; I can’t explain them in a few short sentences. What’s clear though is that for power users who have a Google account, there has been another important layer of personalisation added.

The rankings differ significantly when logged in and out. For instance I see shared results for the keyword [seo] on #3 and #5, while they are usually #5 and #7 behind the Google News results. Compare the two screenshots below, the logged in version comes first.

Social search is not just Google though. Google is late to the party. There have been several first generation social search engines around since 2009 or earlier, but most of them haven’t survived or only offer a poor user experience and search quality. On the other hand there are plenty of new tools out there – not necessarily search engines as we know them – that offer unmatched social search capabilities.

 

Last but not least, Bing and Blekko offer Facebook search, which Google does not. So it’s time to dig deeper into search, both from an end user and an SEO specialist perspective. Thus I have compiled one of my infamous lists: 30 Social Search Tools & SEO Resources for Power Users.

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