Around the middle of Janurary, Google rolled out “Search Plus Your World” (hereon called SPYW), which means that logged-in users will get their organic search results augmented with socially shared content and markup, ostensibly from Google+. Danny Sullivan already wrote up two pieces about that (Google’s Results Get More Personal & Real-Life Examples of How Search Plus Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy), which cover the changes brilliantly, so I suggest reading those, before carrying on.

In case you didn’t read them though, the important points are that when you’re logged in, you’ll see:

• Normal web listings, as they would normally be
• Normal listings pushed up or down, by your search history, and/or social connections
• Public Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos, and
• Private or “Limited” Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you

There’s a bigger picture here though, and to see it we have to move beyond what Google+ is, and on to what it represents, bearing in mind Larry Page’s recent statement:

This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else.

That sounds like Larry trying to channel a bit of the late Steve Jobs. A unified, beautiful product, and if you don’t like it, get out.

The Pledge

In magic, every trick has three parts: the pledge, the turn and the prestige. In the pledge, you’re shown something ordinary, like a deck of cards or a book. You’re asked to inspect it, to check it’s real. The point is of course, whatever is going on is so subtle that you won’t see it, even when looking. In the turn, the magician takes back the item and makes it do something extraordinary. A card gets shuffled in the pack, and the magician blindfolded. The book is shredded and the person put in another room. The places are set for something amazing to happen.

And then we get the prestige: the card is inside the bottom of your shoe, or the magician has had someone else write down a word, and it’s the one you chose. The part where everything defys the laws of nature and is put back together.

So what’s Google’s Pledge? Well, it’s to build a search engine. Lots of people were doing it back when they started. But they did a good job, and removed the clutter, and build a good product and refined it and many years later, here we are. They’ve monetised it well, and become a verb and done all the things that aspiring Valley companies aim to do.

The clever part though, was not stepping on too many toes along the way. By (pretty much) staying a search engine (although what they searched got bigger), Google quietly trundled along.

The Turn

And then Google got weird. Forays in to social, sponsoring of projects that had no real basis in searching for things. Gmail, a great product for email, but bearing no real relationship to search arrived. And the Android came along. Again, an interesting product, with no relationship to search. And most recently, Google+.

With all these projects, it looks like Google’s trying to compete with dominant players in an important space – with Gmail it was Hotmail and Yahoo, in the case of Android, Apple (and iOS specifically), and with Google+, obviously the target is Facebook.

But here’s the thing, saying that they’re trying to compete with those services misses the point. In waiting for the prestige, people keep forgetting that Google swapped the order of the trick around. But the trick takes so long to pull off, everyone forgot that they were told what would happen.

The Prestige

You can actually see what the prestige will be, over on Google’s About page…

Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful

Or consider the quote given to The Guardian

Our goal with search has always been to provide the most relevant results possible. That’s why for years we’ve been working on social search features to help you find the most relevant information from your social connections no matter what site it’s on. Search plus Your World doesn’t change who has access to content, it simply helps people rediscover information they already have access to. We’ve taken special care with our new features to provide robust security protections, transparency and control for our users.

Google doesn’t care about social, or mapping, or your inbox, or even search really. Google cares about information; specifically storing it and holding it in a format that’s useful, so when you go to look for something they’ve got the answer, and ads to show you alongside it.

The Future

Google will continue to expand in to everything. They’ll push new technologies in every sector, so as they take off, it’ll fund their insatiable appetite for information. They’re working on driverless cars which will be vastly safer and more environmentally friendly. And of course, they’ll be able to suggest restaurants to you on the journey, and know your travel patterns and be able to advertise to you better because of it.

Google aims to be the Dyson of information, sucking everything in and, when you need them, giving the perfect advert back. A profitable way to run a search engine, certainly, but the best one? I’ll let you decide that for yourself.

What a week this has been in search! On Tuesday Google changed the rules in a big way and this time it could have a significant impact on search results. Don’t be alarmed its unlikely to affect your results over night so there is time to embrace the changes that are needed but change is definitely necessary unless you want to risk getting left behind.

Google are constantly updating their algorithm which is why they continue to be the most popular search engine by a country mile. But this week they took a step that forces those serious about the success of their website to sit up and listen – by engaging with Google+.

Why? In simple terms Google rolled out “Search, Plus Your World” which personalises search results like never before. In effect Google are looking at social graphs as well as link graphs to determine what results are displayed and they are taking the social indicators primarily from Google+.

What does Search, Plus Your World look like?

Google+, Twitter or Facebook – too many platforms?

The majority of Google+’s now 60M users are at the more tech savvy end of the user spectrum, the early adopters and those who are already heavily engaged in social media. I have to admit that when Google+ came along my initial feeling was that I didn’t need another social media time suck when I can get what I need from Facebook for friends and family and Twitter for business.

Google+ does seem to have taken the best bits of our favourite social media platforms and mashed them together to produce something that is quite slick, clean and very user friendly. But as its trying to do what Facebook and Twitter do so will those embedded in those systems jump ship or take on an extra platform? We’ll have to wait and see.

The beauty of Google+ is that you can mix business and personal in one stream without upsetting either group with irrelevant content because you choose what each group (circle) sees. And it beats Twitter by not forcing you to talk in scrunched up witty sound bites. The only problem with Google+ is that there aren’t enough people on there. However this push towards personalising search results means commercial sites are being forced to engage and eventually this Google gamble could turn the social world upside down so that everyone ends up using it.

7 Steps to Google+ success

1. companies need to create a presence on Google+
2. so they can engage with existing communities
3. by sharing awesome content
4. and so grow their social graph
5. Google will reward your site in search results
6. as well as embellishing your Adwords display
7. and so your click through rate will increase

Simple huh? With anything “social” we advise clients to be very clear about what they want to achieve from their efforts. It makes sense to understand the audience you are reaching out to and deliver value but its just as important to measure the success of your social campaigns.

Google has made it a very simple decision for companies to make the choice to adopt a Google+ campaign – the message is that if you don’t you could be left behind. So lets get started

Getting a Presence on Google+

Create a Google+ Profile and Business Page

This video is a Google webinar with full instructions on “Getting you Business on Google+” its 34mins and covers everything you need to know to get set up. It also includes some pro tips dotted throughout which are well worth taking note of .

Draft Up Your Google+ Social Strategy

Your social strategy needs to match with your business objectives so it needs some thought and planing otherwise you can easily waste a lot of time and achieve very little.

Here are some pointers to get your strategic juices flowing:

• Which platforms will your target audience favour? Be on them e.g. Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Google+
• What do you want your campaigns to achieve? E.g. brand awareness, links, new leads, customer service, write down all the reasons you are doing this.
• Who will run your social campaigns? – inhouse or outsourced
• What measures of success will you use? E.g. traffic measures: analytics will tell you about traffic referrals & what those visitors do; how valuable are they compared to other sources; or, social engagement metrics: are your followers increasing, are you getting retweets and mentions. Identify suitable measures and monitor them monthly.
• What is your Content Strategy? This is really important as it should outline what awesome and original content you will have to share with your community on an ongoing basis. E.g. blog posts, tutorials, video, webinars, white papers, infographics, widgets, resources/knowledgebase etc.
• Decide HOW you will interact with your community and stick to your own rules. E.g. find and follow the influencers in your industry, develop relationships with them, gain trust by being helpful and providing quality information, retweet/share their stuff, engage in conversation, ask questions etc.
• Be real! “Social” means treating people online like you would face-to-face.

When you have decided on your strategy and tactics start implementing them but keep your strategy under review constantly & update anything that needs a tweak. And don’t forget those measures of success, they will help keep you focused.

At Strategy we have previously advised on but not run social campaigns for clients, this is changing as we see how our creative link building strategies are integrating with social engagement. SEO is evolving constantly but these creative and social factors are the most exciting aspect of internet marketing. Its harder work, demanding more commitment to the long game and greater resources but the end result is worth it.

Circle Strategy Internet Marketing on Google+ or +KathDawson and +1 this post by clicking the link just under the title. Please share your comments and views on Search, Plus Your World and how you think this will affect your business.

You may have noticed in recent months that there is a new version of analytics accessible within your existing account. It looks quite different but has much of the same data. The navigation is organised in a more sensible way and the filtering options & advanced segments are easier to manage. Its a step forward in more ways that just the layout and usability interface. There are a number of new features that allow you to explore your data in deeper and more interesting ways:

Google Analytics Real-Time

Reporting in “real-time” allows you to see what’s happening on your site right now! The reports are updated continuously and each pageview is reported only seconds after it occurs on your site. For Real-Time reports look in the ‘Home’ tab.

Multi-Channel Funnels

This is an excellent new feature as it allows you to see which channels your visitors used during the 30 day period prior to them converting or purchasing. By looking at your conversion path data you can see visitors who found your site first through PPC and then returned to convert through organic search. This section measures the performance of clicks from many media channels including paid and organic searches, affiliates, social networks, and display ads.

See a Video demo & a Guide to using the Multi-Channel Funnels Report.

Mobile Reporting

As the number of visitors using mobile devices to browse the web increases the new mobile reports in analytics helps you understand how these new visitors are interacting with your site. By seeing how many visitors use your site from various devices you can make decisions about optimising for those devises.

Flow Visualization

This completely new report shows visually how visitors navigate through your site. This report is replaces the clunky navigation tools available in the old version of Google Analytics.

Watch the Video demo for more details and check out the Usage guides for Visitor Flow and Goal Flow

Over the next few weeks the new version of Google Analytics will become the default.

“My, but we’ve come a long way”, we’ll say on the day when Google’s list of links finally disappears. And that day will come sooner than many think.

Over the past eight or so years that I’ve been working in the search industry, I’ve seen a lot of changes. Google News & Froogle (what was to become the Shopping search interface) had only recently launched, Google’s entire index was less than 6 billion pages, there was no Gmail, no mobile search, YouTube, Facebook, Bing was MSN Search and powered by Looksmart & Inktomi, Yahoo! was powered by Google’s technology…

More interesting though has been the lack of innovation in result UI. Oh sure, we’ve got much richer results now than we’ve ever had before, and the underlying technology is far in advance of what it was then, but in terms of how we actually deliver results, I’m not so sure.

A Future Interface

Let me clarify. Based on some recent comments by people at both Google and Microsoft, with regards to answering search queries, the interfaces of the future clearly aren’t going to look like they are now. Instead, they’re going to focus far more on actually answering the users question. We’ve seen the start of this with Google’s recipe search, and Bing’s travel search products.

However, these are just the beginnings of a greater shift in how we interact with the great database that is the Internet. For a more complete understanding, we rather strangly, have to turn to the world of TV game shows.

Search? It’s Elementary My Dear Watson

Earlier this year, Watson, a supercomputer built by IBM, trounced the two greatest human Jeopardy! players at their own game. Much like a modern web search engine, Watson runs thousands of algorithms symulatniously to actually calculate the correct answer to a question. Now, this is fine for where there is an actual answer (questions like ‘what is the’, ‘in what year did’, ‘where can you’ etc), but for ones where a user decision is required, we need to look beyond this.

At this point, we get in to the idea of a twin-structured search engine. In the first part, it’d simply attempt to answer a question presented to it. We can already see this done, if you ask an engine what the time is in a certain place, what a cinema is showing today, or if you want an answer to a calculation. It’s simply an extension (albeit a huge one) of technology that’s already in place.

In this particular area, SEO as we know it will die. Google will simply parse the question and deliver the answer. No links involved.

The second area though, where the user needs to decide based on information, is quite different. This is where the semantic web truly comes in to its own.

Second Site

The semantic web is a fairly old idea, the crux of which is that one day, all the data on the web will be understandable by machines. To kick-start this, Google, Bing and Yahoo! recently announced the launch of schema.org, a protocol similar to XML sitemaps (but with far broader scope) in that it aims to get the entire web marked up in a way that will facilitate this.

In this new web, a search engine would be able to grab any piece of data from any website, understand it, and then use it to produce better answers for the user. So if I were to type in ‘best small family car’, my results page would show me various small family cars, ratings by various associations, new & used prices, ancilliary information (videos, image galleries etc), and links to places to go to buy one.

This offers an exciting possibility for consumers – instant, well presented information on any topic, with the option to go out and view the original source information, with greater expansion on the subject if required. Think of it like an uber-Wikipedia. For a live example of something like this working, take a look at this results page for ‘yoga poses’ in Bing.

Welcome to the Jungle

Now, for the record, I don’t know what Microsoft or Google’s intentions are. But it’s increasingly clear that if they wanted, this is a direction that they could move in. With their increasingly titanic data stores, they’re in an amazing position to completely transform how we interact with the world’s information. For now though, webmasters need to consider three things:

• Marking up your data probably won’t help your rankings in any particular area at the moment
• Not marking up your data almost certainly will stop you ranking in different forms of search interface in the future
• The websites that act now will, as always, be better placed when change comes along

So do you need to worry about getting your data marked up today? No, but have it in the back of your mind, and make sure you do it sooner rather than later.

We speak to a lot of Clients who don’t realise that it is extremely important for their site navigation, (commonly referred to as internal links or information architecture) to be extremely well considered so that the right pages get indexed easily and regularly by the search engine spiders. Connected to the site architecture is the preference that no one page contains more than 100 links, this keeps the quality score assigned to each link at a respectable level and helps the spiders move through the site properly.

Crawl Priority

To start, it helps to understand how the spiders prioritise the pages, and then crawl the site.

Spiders will visit popular pages more often, popular pages are defined by the number of back-links and the site architecture should correlate with this. For example:

• Your homepage, and chosen landing pages, should be the most popular with the most back-links
• First and second level category pages should be fairly popular but containing less back-links than the homepage
• At the bottom of the priority are the deepest pages, these will be pages such as news pages, product pages, service price lists etc

The spiders will enter the site via a landing page, this doesn’t need to be the homepage, they will then follow links through each page looking to index the whole site. They don’t like being sent in circles and they don’t like feeling lost in too many links, so it’s important that your site architecture makes it as easy as possible for the spiders to do their job, whilst getting all the pages which need indexing, indexed. Ideally you want the spiders to be able to index everything within three clicks of arriving on the site, regardless if that is your homepage or your deepest category page.

XML Site Maps

XML site maps are seen as the quick fix for architecture issues, and this is what they are. They do not resolve problems in the site architecture and internal navigation, they merely hide the problems so that you are unaware of them.

In an ideal world, you would not add an XML site map until you know the website architecture is sound and secure and most importantly indexing on it’s own. Below are some basic architecture tips to get you started.

Keep Architecture Flat

You want to keep your architecture as flat and easy to navigate as possible, whilst retaining the three click rule (if a spider lands on one of your deeper pages, can they reach the other pages within three links?)

In a brand new website the following structure is a common one used with the 100 links per page being the absolute maximum you should have on each page.

At the top: Homepage with no more than 100 links per page
First Level: Categories – no more than 100 pages (each page has no more than 100 links)
Second Level: Sub-Categories – no more than 10,000 (each page has no more than 100 links)
At the bottom: Detail/Products – no more than 1,000,000 pages

Index and rankings are determined by how much authority each page has, the higher the domain authority of your site the more links you can realistically get away with including on each page. As a rough guide, if your website already holds some domain authority (DA) you can increase the links on each page as follows:

DA 7-10 = 250 links
DA 5-7 = 175 links
DA 3-5 = 125 links
DA 0-3 = 100 links

So, the smaller the number of links the spiders have to follow to index the whole site, the happier they are and the more weight each page will hold.

Faceted Navigation

This is a common and useful aspect of ecommerce sites, which allows you to pick facets of a product which are important to you. For example, you could pick the category of T-Shirts, pick the colour black, and the size Medium, the results you are shown then directly correspond with what you specifically want. In essence the website has ignored anything which doesn’t contain the facets you have chosen.

Setting up faceted navigation can be tricky, and you need to keep in mind that the primary facet pages won’t rank, you want the deeper facet pages to rank as these are the one’s that will help the spiders discover all of the product pages.

When setting up faceted navigation, some of the things to keep in mind are:

URL

You must have a unique URL for each facet level. The URL’s should be clear and not complicated and hard to follow:

Clear URL: www.tshirtdomain.co.uk/tshirts/black/medium
Unclear URL: www.tshirtdomain.co.uk/all/tshirts/all/black/all/medium

You also want to ensure that whatever route somebody takes to reach this facet level the same URL is shown so for example:

Somebody clicks on Tshirts, then Medium, then Black the URL they end up on should still be www.tshirtdomain.co.uk/tshirts/black/medium and not www.tshirtdomain.co.uk/tshirts/medium/black which would result in you creating unnecessary duplicate content issues!

Adding & Removing Facets

You should make it easy for your customers to add or remove additional facets as they see fit.

As they add facets to their search these should be displayed as follows so that any or all facets can be removed by the user:

Tshirts [remove]
black [remove]
medium [remove]

So that they can easily choose which facets can be automatically generated from the results meta data so it is easy for you to display the number of results within that facet, for example:

Blue [35]
Green [23]
Yellow [1]

No Index

Any pages which could be considered as duplicate content should be no-indexed, the spiders will still visit these pages but they won’t index them. To keep a page out of the index you want to add some code to the page as follows:

<meta name = “robots” content = “noindex”> – This will make the page no index
<link rel = “canonical” href = “domainname.co.uk/tshirts/black”> – This will take the spiders back to the correct page.

Filtering & Pagination

Another common aspect of ecommerce sites is filtering results. This is where you can choose a filter which will sort the products in a certain way, for example only showing 10 items per page (creating pagination or multiple pages), or showing lowest priced items first.

The ideal way to deal with pagination in category results is to programme the page to show all results rather than writing each page of results as page 1, page 2, etc.

Once the main category page has been created you can then use javascript to create the pagination. Search engine spiders don’t follow javascript so you don’t risk duplicate content from having multiple pages under each content, but all of the products are indexed.

Plan, Plan, and Plan Again

Don’t under-value the benefit of properly planning your website. Most of our examples have referred to ecommerce sites, but the same principal applies to brochure sites. Plan to succeed and your website will be a spider’s navigational dream and you will be rewarded with good search results and no duplicate content issues.

In summary, the number one rule for you to keep in mind when you are planning your navigation is that you want as few pages as possible to be indexed, whilst allowing for each and every product page to be indexed.

Around a year ago, Google introduced their new database architecture, Caffeine. This changeover was done for several reasons, the first of which was to allow Google to continue to index all of the web in years to come, and the second of which was revealed last week: Instant.

The main issue with Instant, from Google’s perspective, is that it generates between 7-10 times the volume of searches per second than the previous version, as Google loads search result pages constantly as people are typing. With the expected rollout of this into browser bar-based searches (like the Chrome bar, the Google toolbar etc), this will almost certainly expand steadily from only appearing to logged-in users, to being the default state for Google.

Ten Blue Links?

So, the main upshot of the changeover to the Caffeine system is that it allows for vast amounts of real-time data to be added to the index almost as fast as it’s created. But what does this mean in terms of rankings?

Well, in short, it allows fresh data to be displayed to users much more rapidly. As a result, we’ve seen greater emphasis on results featuring video, location-based services, news items, personalised results and the like over the last year. This has had the effect of changing the strategy for SEO in certain industries, as it has created new avenues for search marketers to reach their intended audiences.

Instant Coffee Anyone?

A lot has been written about Instant over the last couple of days, some of it accurate, some of it less-so. To save time, I’ve compiled some basic takeaway points as to the nature of Instant, what it brings to the table, and how it affects SEO and PPC.

• Does Google kill SEO? No, but it does change keyword research slightly, as marketers need to pay greater attention to the suggested keyword searches
• Negative keywords need to be paid closer attention to in PPC, as a search for “U2 new” will return results for “U2 new album”, where a user might type their full query as “U2 new zealand tour dates”
• PPC ad impressions will only count when:
  • the user clicks anywhere on the page after beginning to type a search query
  • the user chooses one of the predicted queries from Google Instant
  • the user stops typing and search results are shown for at least three seconds
• The nuts and bolts of how SEO is conducted on-site and in linkbuilding hasn’t changed
• The nuts and bolts of how PPC is conducted hasn’t changed either, although it is now pretty much the only good way of getting impression data for search volume numbers for keywords. Keyword tools will soon be relegated to being only useful for generating keyword ideas, not for estimating volume

To gain top listings in the search engines it helps if you understand how the search engines work with your website and how they determine which websites get to appear at the top.

Search engines uses robots (other names are spiders or crawlers) which are programs that visit websites by following links from one page to another. When a robot visits a page it will take a copy of that page and put it in the search engine’s own database (this process is known as caching a page). Once in the database the search engine will apply their algorithm to tag or index the page so that its position in the SERPs for any given search term can be determined quickly.

Website pages need to be indexed regularly in order to stand any chance of performing. Each page on a website that is indexed can be produced in the SERPs so every indexed page should be considered to be a potential landing page. You can easily block any page that you do not want to get indexed and concentrate efforts on optimising important landing pages.

The algorithms used by the search engines take into consideration many different factors (Google has about 200 factors) when they evaluate a page and decide where it should appear in their results pages. SEO considers each page on a website and applies the best fit to get the best ranking for that page amongst its competition. However, competition for different phrases is not equal and so the same thing that is successful for one page is not necessarily effective for another page.

Search engines want to provide the best and most relevant results for their users and so our efforts are concentrated on meeting the demands of the algorithms through white hat methods. With Google having up to 85% of the UK search market we tend to favour Google’s algorithm which in turn favours good quality content combined with quality, relevant inbound links. These clean strategies also feed Yahoo’s and MSN’s algorithms too.

For competitive market places it is harder to get top rankings for generic product and service related search terms because other websites have fought hard to get to the top and will defend their position against newcomers. With the right strategy, over time, top listings can be achieved but we would argue that the value is in the conversions achieved and conversions can come from a much wider source than the immediately obvious generic phrases.

Approximately 80% of searches performed every day are unique and many use 3, 4 or 5 word phrases, they are quite specific phrases and so they tend to convert well – this is commonly referred to as the “long tail” of search and its value should not be underestimated.

Our approach to optimising our client’s websites be to develop a two-pronged strategy that aims for the top competitive search engine listings and also top listings for a wide variety of long tail search phrases.  We know that the bottom line for our clients is to make more money so that is what we help them do.

If you are interested to know more about how the search engines are working with your own website you can conduct your own mini website SEO audit. Follow the simple steps and you will find the answers to the questions below, you can also so the same with your competitor sites and see what you can learn to improve your own site.

Is my site indexed by the search engines?
How many links do I have pointing to my site?
What are my Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs)?
What do my meta tags look like?

You can do SEO on your website yourself and we encourage clients to have an understanding of how we work but doing your own optimisation is much like fixing your own roof – you can buy the tools, read a book and have a go… it will cost you time and energy and it may get the result you want, or you can leave it to the professionals and go do something else that is a better use of your own time.

In search engines results pages (SERPs) a single listing for a popular phrase will bring you traffic if it ranks high enough. However, having a second indented listing just under that main listing doesn’t just stand to bring you 100% more traffic, it could bring you as much as 200% more traffic. Its all to do with the way that people view the search results, fixate on ceratin points and click through to your website.

Studies of indented listings using heap maps show that where the primary listing is popular the indented listing is more popular, it gets more fixation points and more clicks than the primary listing does. You don’t have to have a number 1 primary listing in order to get an indented listing, you can get this listing at positions 8 & 9, at positions 4 & 5 or positions 23 and 24, it doesn’t make a difference where your primary listing appears. You want the highest possible listing, of course you do but my point is that you don’t have to be number one to achieve an indented listing.

An added bonus is that double listings can also help to increase your ranking positions and push you up the search engines results pages.

How do you get a double listing?

The primary listing is the page on your site that is deemed most relevant to the search phrase and the second listing is the page that is deemed second most important – the key is to find out which is the second best page for that phrase. Double listing’s only show when both pages are ranked on the same SERPs page so – SEO TIP – change your preferences on Google to show 100 results in the SERPs (the default is 10 per page), use the ‘find’ function to locate your website and see if you have a double listing showing. If you do then the second URL is the one you need to work on to strengthen the optimisation for the search phrase you are using.