Rich snippets attribute extra information to a search result to provide the searcher with a further insight into what the link may contain.
This could be information about the track listing on an album, for instance, or the star rating of your favourite restaurant. The good news, and there only really is good news, is that they give the searcher a more informed choice before they have clicked a link. Continue Reading
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”:http://searchengineland.com/googles-results-get-more-personal-with-search-plus-your-world-107285 & “Real-Life Examples of How Search Plus Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy”:http://searchengineland.com/examples-google-search-plus-drive-facebook-twitter-crazy-107554), which cover the changes brilliantly, so I suggest reading those, before carrying on. Continue Reading
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
People are always interested to know how many more clicks they are likely to receive if they appear at position 1 of the search engine results pages for their chosen key-phrases. There are many different studies and statistics available about organic click-through rates on the internet, many of which are contradictory. This report details findings from some of the more well known studies and how much you can actually learn from them.
Below is a chart detailing the data from the famous AOL data leak in 2006. Although old, this data is still often quoted as gospel.
This study was conducted by Neil Walker, a UK based SEO expert. Some Blog posts suggest Walker’s study is based on Webmaster Tools data across 2700 keywords. Walker himself claims that the data comes from a study of Webmaster Tools in 2010, the AOL data of 2006 and an eye tracking study conducted in 2004.
Another well known study conducted in 2010 was by Chitika, a data analytics company in the business of advertising. For their study, they looked at a sample of traffic coming into their advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement.
Well, it is clear that if you are at position 1 in the search engine results pages, you are very likely to receive substantially more clicks. However, there are always exceptions to this rule.
For a long time, if you searched for ‘mail’ on Google, Gmail would come up at position 1 and Yahoo would come up at position 2. Still, Yahoo received in excess of 50% of the click-throughs. Studies indicated that this was because people searching for ‘mail’ were looking to login to their Yahoo mail account.
This example illustrates that if people are looking for something specific, they will not always click on position 1 if it doesn’t seem to offer what they are looking for. Another example is Wikipedia: they are often displayed in high positions for a wide range of phrases, but won’t always receive a high click-through rate because people aren’t always looking for general information.
In summary, at position 1 of the search engine results pages you are extremely likely to receive the most clicks, but exactly how many more than the lower positions is impossible to say. However, the figures in the studies detailed above can give a good indicator of what to expect. Search engine results positions and click-through rates will always be dependant on high quality SEO, your choice of key-phrases, and the area of business in which you operate.
Most companies with a website are probably guilty of claiming on their website and internet marketing activities that they are ‘the best’ in their field. However this will be a risky claim to make from 1st March 2011 when the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) extend the advertising rules around making these claims to include online advertising. Continue Reading
2010 was a busy year for search and particularly Google who have upped their game yet again. In this post we’ll review some of the major highlights for SEO in the last year.
In April 2010 Google announced that the speed your page loads for a visitor is a factor considered in their ranking algorithm. Basically if your page loads slowly then you’ll drop down the rankings. Don’t panic though, its only likely to affect really slow loading sites but keep your eye on this factor and if you are in a very competitive market and your rankings are slipping this could be an area to improve.
In the USA the integration was complete and Yahoo’s independent index was retired thus giving Bing a leap in market share. Of course they are so far behind Google that they cannot be compared at all however Bing is now a competitor worthy of attention.
Google applies an extremely complex algorithm which takes into consideration hundreds and hundreds of different factors and they are constantly tweaking and improving it to ensure that the results presented are the best they can be. Sometimes there are more significant tweaks, or algorithm updates, that have a more dramatic affect. The May Day update resulted in many websites losing long tail traffic (up to 10 percent or more). The sites that suffered seemed to have a low number of deep links. The winners were “high quality” sites and big brands.
This was not an algorithm update although its often confused as one especially as it was introduced close to the May Day Update. Caffeine was an infrastructure change which related purely to speeding up the indexing system. Caffeine allowed new content to be indexed almost instantly rather than in batches which was slower.
In September Google Instant impacted the user experience in a very noticeable way by showing suggested search phrases as you typed your phrase into the search box. The idea being that if you saw what you wanted appearing in the list then you wouldn’t need to finish typing. It wasn’t just the suggestions popping up that was so noticeable it was the fact that all the results changed as you typed too – it could be quite distracting. Google Instant also impacted the long tail as more people gave up typing in longer phrases & went with the suggestions.
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.
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.
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.
The credit crunch isn’t going to dent the volume of sales made online this Christmas, in fact its more likely to bring increased sales as people search for bargains. The season starts early on the internet so now is the time to ensure your site is ready for all those lovely visitors.
Here are some tips to get your website ready for Christmas:
Good luck for the coming season – CapGemini recently predicted that online sales in the UK will increase by 60% in the three months up to Christmas so this is definitely the time to be paying attention to your online marketing strategy. Give us a call on 0845 838 0936 if you are interested in driving more traffic to your website this season – there is a very good chance we can help you quickly.
As the singularly most important thing that the vast majority of websites want to achieve it is essential that you measure your conversions from all your different sources. If you don’t care whether your website brings you conversions then this post is not for you.
However, if you want your website to make you money… read on! Continue Reading
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