Google Search Engine Updates
November 24, 2009
Here is an overview of some recent updates and refinements to Google’s search engine. It seems as if Google is collecting more and more click data across many verticals, ramping up local results further with future monetization objectives in mind, and last but not least, dipping into the product search query market.
1. For both universal and vertical search terms, the search result page is starting to display the local 10 pack listing above organic results. Now, the top 75% of the 1st page is primarily Google directed clicks. This makes things more difficult for SEO campaigns and some industry experts such as Matt Cutts are suggesting focusing on more and more long tail searches would be the way to go. Google would not want to dilute long tail search queries with universal/local listings displayed ahead of organic results. This also signals the importance of being #1 for your main keywords on search result pages that primarily display the local pack ahead of organic listings. #2 wouldn’t do much good.
2. Google is moving more into the display product ad market. Their e Commerce search engine has just recently opened up and the similar concept that has been taken into effect with Book, Loan related searches (e.g. Lending Tree model), Google portal results will be displayed ahead of organic. With their display ads, if you search any product, not only will the eCommerce results be listed above organic, but on the right hand corner you will see actual images of the products in sponsored listings. Fortunately, this won’t effect lead generation SEO campaigns but there is speculation that Google is collecting more and more click data for lead gen verticals and will eventually move into that market.
3. Google Caffeine Put on Hold. Small elements of caffeine may have been implemented, but this should have little to no effect for most webmasters just yet. Matt Cutts announced Google will roll out Caffeine at one data center after the holidays, and slowly build it up over time. It is speculated that Google moving into more affiliate verticals such as product and lead gen, is a bigger threat than caffeine is.
source: seobook.com/blog
Google Adwords go Local!
November 23, 2009
They are including phone number, address and also maps. Please view http://searchengineland.com/google-appears-to-be-testing-new-local-adwords-presentation-30250
Advanced Filtering in Analytics
November 23, 2009
I just noticed this weekend that there is a new filtering feature in analytics that allows you to url by more than one include or exclude filter. Pretty handy when you’re trying to drill down into one group of pages and filter out exceptions.
Common SEO Problems and Tools to Solve Them
November 20, 2009
1. View Source OR Valuing a potential link
a. http://www.seomoz.org/mozbar
b. has this spiffy “Analyze Page” button that opens a visual overlay with critical stats like meta data, link counts, rel=”canonical,” Hx tags, and even counts of characters in content areas.
c. The mozRank and mozTrust factor help understand the value of a link
2. Determining a PageRank Penalty
a. http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/pagerank
b. This tools give you a history of Page Ranks reported
c. When PageRank has been lowered more than one point, particularly in a timeframe that doesn’t correlate with a standard PR update, you can feel relatively confident that some sort of PR penalty was incurred.
d. When PR is significantly lower than mozRank, particularly on the homepage of a website, there’s a potential that a PR penalty may exist
3. Watching rankings over time
a. http://www.seomoz.org/rank-tracker OR http://www.advancedwebranking.com/
b. You can watch rankings across multiple engines and geographies, and the interface is simple + easy to use.
4. Comparing Page Metrics
a. http://www.seomoz.org/labs/lsvisualize
b. The visual shapes represent the degree to which the page is meeting that metric’s potential
5. Finding Competitors’ links
a. http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect
b. enter your site plus at least two competitors. The tool results will show you a list of domains that contain links to pages from your competitors but don’t point to you
6. Tracking links and mentions in the fresh web
a. http://www.seomoz.org/labs/blogscape
b. Gives a graph of what’s been happening in the blogosphere/twitosphere with a list of URLs where the action’s taking place
7. Backlink analysis
a. http://www.seomoz.org/labs/backlinks
b. Not only do you get a list of links ordered by relative importance in just a few seconds (slightly longer if the URL/domain has many thousands of links), you also retrieve an ordered list of anchor text distribution pointing to the page, subdomain or root domain.
8. Metrics from different sources
a. http://www.seomoz.org/trifecta
b. If need a long list of metrics from a variety of sources – Compete, Alexa, Google PageRank, Yahoo! Link Counts, Google News mentions, etc
9. Finding Competitors’ Most Successful Linkbait
a. http://www.seomoz.org/labs/toppages
b. Gives data about which pages on a given subdomain or root domain have earned the most links.
10. Identifying Pages that Can Flow Link Juice Internally
a. http://www.seomoz.org/labs/toppages
b. Not only can we see which pages have earned link juice, but we can also identify potential problems (302s and blocking w/ robots.txt being two of the big ones)
11. Social Media monitoring
a. http://www.seomoz.org/labs/blogscape_prototype
12. Find link search queries
a. http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-finder/index.php
b. Enter a few pieces of data about your site and the link campaign you’re running and it will spit back links to tons of relevant search queries and link lists. While it doesn’t automate everything, it can also be a huge boost in exposing ways to find and earn links you might not have considered.
13. Determine a Keyword’s Relative SEO Competitiveness
a. http://www.seomoz.org/keyword-difficulty
b. Provides a quick view into metrics that have historically helped SEOs determine potential competitiveness, as well as a percentage score that gives a sense of relative competition level.
14. On Page Optimization
a. http://www.seomoz.org/term-target
b. just plug in the keyword you’re targeting and the page you want to rank and it sends back an analysis of the keyword usage, along with recommendations for where and how to employ the query term.
Source: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/30-seo-problems-the-tools-to-solve-them-part-1-of-2
Eight Local SEO Signals You May Not Have Considered
November 19, 2009
I’ve been flipping through all the interviews by Michael Gray, found here, and tried to pull out some ideas that aren’t already floating all around the web regarding local search signal and rankings. I came up with eight items I thought would provide both value for people landing on a local website or profile page, as well as adding a lot of unique local signals to tell google and others your site caters to locals.
1. Directions
Obviously, having your address and phone number seems to be one of the most common (and likely necessary) signals on a local page.
Beyond that, and interesting idea is to have more creative “human” directions like, across the street from McDonalds, or right next to the USCIS building on Sansome in San Francisco. As much as possible, try to correlate your business geographically to landmarks near it.
It might be helpful to have a dedicated directions page.
2. Hours of Operation
Just like your storefront or office door, list your operating hours. Unlike websites, local business open and close daily.
3. Emergency Contact Info
This was not in the list, but for criminal attorneys or others where urgent help might be required, it would be helpful for visitors to know how to contact you in emergency situations.
4. Local Affiliations
Add information regarding any local groups, chamber of commerce, bar association, clubs or any other local affiliations you may have. Not only is this another potential signal for search engines, but also establishes that you’re an active member of the searchers community.
5. Relevant Local Resources
Offer up some recommended local resources that your potential clients might find helpful. For example, a criminal attorney might recommend a bail bondsmen or location of the DA’s office. An auto accident or personal injury lawyer probably knows some good bodyshops or even doctors.
6. Local Events Your Business is Part of
Many local business partake in “main street” gatherings, or have local speaking engagements. List out the events you are, have been and are going to be part of.
7. Capture Niche Regional Phrases
Every geography has its own geographical lingo. If you’re in Santa Monica, you serve the “West Side”. Oakland lawyers service the “East Bay”. San Jose intellectual property lawyers are part of “Silicon Valley”. Honestly, I don’t have any data on how frequently people use terms like these when searching, but it’s one more way to establish your local “relevance”.
8. Include the Names of Local Cities and Towns in Which You Operate
Often times, a business may be located in “Bumsville”, but get’s most of it’s business from “The City”. Make sure to have all those local cities and towns included in your site content.
Local search is coming, so make sure your site or profile page is ready to take advantange of it.
Local Search Ranking Factors (Local SEO)
November 18, 2009
- LBL Address in City of Search
- Citations from Major Data Providers
- Association of Proper LBL Categories
- General Importance of Claiming LBL
- Product/Service Keywords in LBL Title
- General Importance of Off-Page Criteria
- Volume of Customer Reviews
- General Importance of Customer Reviews
- General Importance of On-Page Criteria
- Full Address on Contact Page
- Proximity to Centroid
- Quality of Inbound Links
- HyperLocal/Web Crawl Citations
- Product/Service Keywords in LBL Description
- Location Keywords in Inbound Anchor Text
- Customer Reviews at Search Engine
- Location Keywords in LBL Title
- Product/Service Keywords in Inbound Anchor Text
- Inclusion of City, State in Title Tags
- Customer Reviews at 3rd-Party Websites
- Location Keywords in LBL Description
- Quantity of Inbound Links
- City, State in Contact Page Title Tags
- Product/Service Keywords in URL
- Product/Service Keywords in LBL Custom Fields
- Association of Marginal LBL Categories
- Location Keywords in URL
- LBL Phone Number with Local Area Code
- Association of LBL Videos
- Local Phone Number on Contact Page
- MyMaps/User Generated Content
- High PageRank Homepage
- Association of LBL Photos
- Creation of KML File
- Positive Customer Ratings
- Location Keywords in LBL Custom Fields
- Address in hCard Microformat on Website
- High PageRank LBC Landing Page
- Age of LBL
- Association of Coupon with LBL
- Participation in Local PPC
Negative Factors
- Use of (800) # in LBL (most benign)
- Multiple Addresses on Contact Page
- Negative Customer Ratings
- Exclusive Use of (800) # on Contact Page
- Multiple LBLs with Same Business Name
- Exclusive Use of PO Box
- Multiple LBLs with Same Phone Number
- Multiple LBLs with Same Address (most harmful)
Most Important Data Providers + IYP Sites
- infoUSA
- Superpages
- Localeze
- YellowPages
- Yelp
- InsiderPages
- Niche Industry Sites (BBB, Vertical Directories)
- Acxiom
- Yahoo
- Citysearch
Other sites receiving significant votes: Niche Civic/Municipal Sites (Chamber of Commerce, Local Directories), Merchant Circle, UniversalBusinessListing, Yellowbot.
Most Important Review Engines
- Yelp
- InsiderPages
- Yahoo
- CitySearch
- Superpages
- Niche Industry Sites (BBB, Vertical Directories)
- TripAdvisor
- Judysbook
- Kudzu
Source: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml
Page Load Time & Speed Will Likely Be a Ranking Factor in Google
November 18, 2009
While Google’s organic ranking algorithm doesn’t currently utilize page load time (speed) as a factor in determining how “quality” a page is, it is scheduled to be implemented in January along with a number of other things such as Google Caffeine.
Google wants the web to be faster and they believe that in order to facilitate that, Google wants to give fast pages a few “bonus points” while slower pages get a few points taken away.
In the grand scheme of things, it is a good SEO practice to have pages that load fast anyway.
We can utilize a handy tool called Page Speed, which is an add-on firefox extension which allows us to evaluate the performance of webpages and get suggestions on how to improve them.
GEO Tagging
November 18, 2009
Although Geo tags are currently not weighted heavily on Google, they are very easy to implement and can be helpful to any localized business in achieving a higher page rank and increase localized targeted traffic to Bing.
The main reason why Google MAY not put a lot of weight on these tags is because a lot of these tags are not accurate, however they are very trivial to add and can not hurt. Bing has confirmed that they do take Geo tags into consideration in their page rank, and with their deal with Yahoo this increases their search engine traffic market to 30%.
Here are the steps to add the tags provided by Stepforth.com:
“1.) Geo.Position
The Geo Position tag simply consists of the latitude and longitude of your business. There are a number of tools online to help you find your latitude and longitude. One simple easy to use tool can be found over at itouchmap.com. Simply drag the arrow to your location on the map, and it will display this information for you. For Victoria BC, You would use “48.4;-123.4”.
2.) Geo.Placename
The Geo Placename simply consists of your city/town and province; “Victoria, British Columbia” for example.
3.) Geo.Region
Your geo region tag should include the ISO 3166-2 country subdivision code as per the ISO (International Organization for Standardization). You can find your corresponding country code on the ISO.org website.
If your location is British Columbia Canada, your code will be “CA-BC”. The first half is the two digit country code, the second is the 2 character state/province abbreviation.
For a real world example, StepForth would use the following:
<meta name=”geo.position” content=”48.4;-123.4”>
<meta name=”geo.placename” content=”Victoria, British Columbia”>
<meta name=”geo.region” content=”CA-BC”>”
Google Rolling Out New Site Hierarchies Display in Search
November 17, 2009
Google plans on making improvements to their search results that will replace some page URLs by showing the exact location of a sites web page within a hierarchy. Typically, page URL’s are known to be too long, too short, or too obscure. So, the goal & intent behind this change will be to help provide more valuable context and information about a page as quickly as possible to the searcher.
For example,
Old hierarchy:
The URL above does not provide any additional information that may be of value.
New hierarchy:
With the new URL hierarchy it will provide additional & useful information about the specific page by organizing and categorizing the different sections a site may have related to the topic. Also, each phrase in the green line will be an actual link, allowing a searcher to jump directly to the broader category/topic from the search results page.
Google will be analyzing a site’s “breadcrumbs” to best represent the website in the results, so it is important that each page is properly organized & structured within its own sites’ hierarchy.
*UPDATE 11/18/09 – Seems as if the New site hierarchies is beginning to take effect on our site.
Image courtesy of Tomek – finds new url hierarchy on lawfirms.com .
Source: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091117-153015
Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010
November 17, 2009
Matt Cutt’s comments suggests page speed to be part of Google’s search ranking algorithm in 2010. A good user experience includes fast loading web pages. Google recently announced a Site Speed site, which provides webmasters with even more resources specifically aimed at speeding up their pages.
Source: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/13/google-page-speed-may-be-a-ranking-factor-in-2010
