SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION SEO COMPANY

It’s not everyday Google admits they need to improve their own SEO skills.
However - the day (and report) has arrived!

Google recently conducted an audit on its own website’s (including the Google home page) and it seems not even the Search Engine giant can master their own algorithm.

One of the biggest issues identified was Google’s current title tag. For those of you without an expert SEO company on board to explain what a title tag is, it is the blue line that appears on the top of every web page.

So, what did Google learn from this - they need to use more more descrptive words and phrases in their title tags.

Google even had images that led to “404 pages” (For those out of the loop, these are error pages that exist once the URL is obsolete).

Solution - any page that no longer exists should be redirected to its new location.

Now, let’s not get carried away with being too harsh on the Google’s SEO team though!

They scored well in regards to their internal linking structure, both from an SEO and usability perspective.

What can we learn about this?
Now that we have a bit more of an understanding in regards to the metrics Google used to give themselves this “improvement needed” evaluation - we needto be sure our website fulfills the criteria.

Last week’s expected decision on the controversial Google Books Library Project by a US federal judge has been postponed. The judge told a crowded courtroom last week that he will listen with an “open mind” to the arguments for and again Google’s settlement with authors and publishers about the right to scan and publish book titles. U. S. District Court Judge Denny Chin walked into the courtroom at the U. S. Court of the Southern District New York with a tall stack of comments from each of the parties, and stated: “To end the suspense, I’m not going to rule today. There’s too much to digest”.

The Google Books Library Project aims to make it easy for people to find relevant books online. Google’s objective with this project was to enable people to find books that they couldn’t normally find as might be the case with out of print books. The homepage for the project states that the ultimate goal is to “work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalogue of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers”. Google, which has yet to present their case to the judge, have emphasised that the number of books included in the settlement is a small portion (3%) of all the titles in the world. They plan to make 20% of the catalogue free and if they choose, users can purchase the rest from Google.

The project has been under much criticism since its inception from competitors such as Microsoft and Amazon who argue that allowing the project go ahead will basically mean giving Google a license to profit from orphan works and get an unfair advantage. Other critics include some library groups, authors and other competitors. Another concern is that nothing in the settlement would protect users’ personal habits and information from being tracked for behavioural advertising. “The proposed Google book settlement is not a philanthropic effort to bring literature into the 21st century and bridge a literary divide,” opponents Microsoft, Amazon and library groups wrote in a recent filing through the Open Book Alliance. “This de facto exclusive license will provide Google with an enormous advantage over its search competitors.”

There are advocates for this plan such as the University of Michigan who praised the deal because they believe that most of the books in the settlement are scholarly works that are collecting dust on university bookshelves and wouldn’t otherwise be read. Other advocates include blind support groups who say that making publications available online means that people will have easier and cheaper access to works that are hard to come by today.

The settlement is part of Google’s ambitious effort to put the entire world’s books online, aiming to eventually be the main source for searching and buying titles.

There is some talk around about how Twitter has the potential to claim some of Google’s pie in the realm of real-time search. The ability to search for information via Twitter has the distinct and differentiated advantage over Google where the information is being presented real-time and comes direct from the user. For this reason some believe that Twitter is better than Google for researching companies, products and services for real customer feedback, breaking news and live events/conference updates.

The speed at which users can post information via Twitter and for this information to be made searchable instantaneously is an advantage over the slower process Google takes to crawl and list website information. The most common tweet is a link and a small insight.  The value of this link and the insight is quickly voted on as people respond and retweet. Relevance would then be determined by the amounts of these votes, making it a human powered search with the potential to provide very fresh and valid information.

Google Search results example for term ‘google translation’

Twitter search results example for term ‘google translation’

What does this mean for SEO?

Any switched on SEO practitioner will tell you all about the importance of links and its ability to impact your websites rankings. An easy way to generate a good amount of links can be achieved via blog posts. The theory goes that the tweet is the new blog post. In the past, the insight and the associated links were most favourably passed by on through blogs but as Twitter’s already impressive popularity increases, the amount of people posting on blogs will, in theory, decline. With a decline in these ‘votes’ will Google alter their algorithm to balance things out?

What does this mean for Google?

Twitter is differentiaed from Google by the potential to provide relavant and popular information through it’s millions of users. A search tool which provides information direct from a person who has purchased a particular product, viewed a film or used a service you are interested would be of interest to me, how about you?

It could simply be a matter of time before Twitter figures out a way to capatilise on this and claim search market share from Google. Ultimately, I believe it will be the users who decide the vailidity of this assumption. Either way it will be interesting to see how this play out. How will Twitter evolve in the coming year and what will happen with the potential rarefying of the inbound link and what impact will this have on the Google algorithm?

For more information on this endangered link theory, check out James Duthie’s post here.

Back in late November I blogged about the direction of online search and where would it go from here, and as a testament to how rapidly things change in the online world we already have an answer from Google about where they want to take things.

Google Goggles is a new search service offered on mobile phones running Google’s phone operating system, Android. Google Goggles allows the user to take a photo of an object and retrieve information from the web on it. Current requirements to be able to utilise Google Goggles:

* An Android device running Android 1.6 or above
* A QVGA screen
* A camera with autofocus

There are many uses for the service that will change how you search for information:

* Get information instantly by taking photos of:

• Landmarks
• Books
• Artwork
• Products
• Logos
• Wines

* Using the phones internal compass, the camera display can show information about locations such as restaurants relevant to your location and the direction that you point your camera. You’re then able to bring up information on the location (i.e. ratings and comments on restaurants)
* The service can recognise text and using this feature, users are able to scan in information off business cards and save them as contacts directly to the phone

This service is still in development and is not yet able to deliver results as relevant as you would expect via a normal keyword search, however its capabilities will advance through user feedback on the relevancy of their searches and as Google grows their database. Future plans for Google Goggles are to connect it with live updates from social networking sites such as Facebook status posts and Twitter feeds, as well as adding Google’s facial recognition technology (left out of initial release due to its currently limited functionality).

This new technology springs to mind some interesting questions; What will this new technology mean for online marketing? How does Google determine the relevancy of results and analyse images specific to certain topics? How will businesses optimise to generate exposure via this new medium?

From a social perspective, with the potential introduction of facial recognition, what will this mean for privacy? By simply entering a photo you took of someone into the search, will you be able to pull up of online data related to that person from their social networking pages to images to contact details to employment information? Will we have the choice whether or not to be ‘searchable’ online or what information comes up for searches?

This certainly is a space we will be keeping a close eye on.

Official Google Video on Goggles

Visual Demo of Google Goggles Functionality

Google has launched a new URL shortening service, which they claim will make the Internet a safer place. With the increase in use of Twitter, and other social networking services, there has been an increase in the use of URL shortening services. Rather than having a long URL string in posts (often which have a maximum character limit), you can punch the URL into a site, and they will give you a shortened version.

According to Google, here are the major advantages:

•    Stability: Google’s scalable, multi-datacenter infrastructure provides great uptime and a reliable service to our users.
•    Security: As we do with web search, shortened URLs are automatically checked to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites.
•    Speed: At Google we like fast products and we’ve worked hard to ensure this service is quick. We’ll continue to iterate and improve the speed of Google Url Shortener.

You may be asking yourself why Google would be doing this, however with the rise of social networks like Twitter, people are clicking a large number of these links. They could be heading to dodgy sites without knowing it. Or, when spreading links, they could be spreading incorrect links, which would not only hurt branding, but also make it tougher for Google to crawl the web. If a link shortening service goes under, the links will no longer be valid. This hurts both users and Google.

At the moment, this service can only be used within a Google toolbar and Feedburner. Google mentions that if it proves to be successful, then they may expand it to a wider audience.

A recent survey has suggested that internet marketers need to focus more on the mobile marketing sector. Although hardly revolutionary thoughts, the actual numbers to come out of this report are very interesting.
According to the survey, here are the numbers:
-    41% of Internet marketing companies do not have plans in place for mobile marketing for the upcoming year
-    Social networking use has climbed from 23 to 44 per cent
-    Twitter presence has increased from 7 to 35 per cent

These numbers are nothing outside what has been shown in other surveys, however the most interesting number is that only 11 percent of those businesses surveyed actually planned to invest in the mobile sector.

The ramifications of ignoring a large percentage of your user base can be seen in many ways. From not having a site that can be used on a mobile browser, to not having a presence to defend (or market) yourself on Twitter, the pitfalls are many. This will be keenly felt by companies that are trying to target a younger, or more tech savvy market share. Young people are often impatient with sites that don’t display well,  so if they don’t see a friendly version of the site for their mobile browser, they’re not going to hang around.

You can actually track the browsers people use to access your site via Google Analytics. A quick tip would be to look at the bounce rates of your users when looking at the browsers they use. If you see that the mobile users are bouncing at a much higher rate, then you know you’ll need to make sure you better deliver your content for that device.

Normally our blog posts are based around some awesome new piece of technology that Google is unveiling which will make everyone’s online life easier, however this post won’t be of the same vein.

At the moment, when you are logged into your iGoogle account, Google will record your preferences in searches, and give you results that match your previous searching patterns. For example, if in the past you have made searches for Belvedere, a town south of Cairns, then Google would give you results based around that, rather than the Vodka. This is all well and good, but what about if you were stinging for a drink, but don’t know what the Belvedere Vodka bottle looks like? You would have to trawl through a whole bunch of irrelevant results to get what you want.

In the past, this has been easy to get around- just log out of your iGoogle account (or put &pws=0 at the end of the URL string) and you would get more accurate results based on global search trends. Google is now looking at abolishing this, so all uses will get personalised results, based on past browsing cookies, regardless of whether they want it or not.

We firmly believe that manipulating the results for the users based on their past searches is a flawed paradigm, and until Google gets out of it, they will be stuck down the wrong path. In the past, people may have only wanted to search for certain fields that they were experienced in, however with the rise of information available, such limited searches we believe doesn’t harness the full power of the internet.
Google themselves have come out and said that around 20% of all searches are unique (although that was years ago, so we feel that number is lower now), which would indicate that people are using many terms and are searching for a number of topics. By limiting what people will find based on past data, users will not be able to expand their knowledge base.

Compared to the past, users are now much more savvy on how to get the most out of their searches, and know how to expand to relevant searches. When Google added suggestions, we felt that it added a huge benefit to the user’s experiences and knowledge based. This seems to be heading in the wrong direction.

Google recently announced a, soon be launched, real-time search integrated into search results page.

How does it work?
Previously, only a new search request since the last Google query from the user, would show any new relevant information. Now, a new section will be added on the main results page, which will include a capsule that automatically scrolls relevant information within a few seconds after it pops up in the Web index (see below screen shot).

With Google’s current partnership with Twitter and now recently announced, social media giants Facebook and Myspace to fill in real time data from these sources and utilise them in the ‘latest result ‘capsule. Yahoo answers, news articles and blog posts are other streams which will be regularly updated.
With this change, a person requesting information about the Whistler 2010 Olympic Games for example, would not only receive the static links such as videos, pictures and the official Olympic site, but could now see current updates such as people ‘tweeting’ watching the live race and results from events.
With the teaming up of Yahoo and Microsoft for a partnership in the New Year, Google’s bar has again raised try and trump these search engines to maintain their lead as the dominating search engine on the net.

A few months on from the launch of Google’s new tool ‘Sidewiki’, and already it has stirred up much debate as to whether it could be more detrimental to a business’ website than beneficial as perceived by Google.  Google Sidewiki is a sidebar/ popup tool which allows anyone with this feature to post comments and notes about the website, appearing alongside the actual webpage.

Whether you want it or like it, people can leave their personal opinions in the comments box. You cannot stop or moderate what people say, but can only leave it in the hands of the Google Algorithm designed to place the most useful and high quality entries appearing at the top of the comments, instead of its age.  What may need to be looked into is whether comments are legitimate complaints or opinionated users just wanting a say to have an online presence. Some have described it no more than a “glorified comment system” and too “under regulated and uncontrollable”, much like the other forms of social media such as Facebook and Twitter to be of any real value to their business. Just recently in the Sydney Morning Herald an article talked about the ‘PR headache’ that this tool could potentially create. All those displeased customers or disgruntled employees can use this tool to vent their frustrations and negativity for everyone to see, leading to brand business damage and bad press.

However this tool can allows users to provide useful information and different outlooks that could be very beneficial to businesses. Sidewiki emphasises the importance for business to track and get involved in the different types of media that their views and consumers are accessing. Keeping updated on these different avenues and developing ways to manage these forms of communication will maintain business presence as innovative and keeping up with the ever changing trends in such a technology driven society.

If you would like to get more information about Sidewiki, or see what others are saying, go click crazy here.

Continuing their habit of excellence through innovation, Google are not resting on their UI laurels, rather making further changes to help people get the specific information they are after.  The latest change is in site hierarchy displayed in the search results.

At the moment, when you search for a term, and the results are displayed, there is a small green URL telling you where you will be heading. An example is shown below- all we did was search for SEO, and this was the first result that came up.

At the moment, if there is a long URL, the user can’t get too much information about what section of the site they are going to- all they can get is the main URL, and possibly some idea based on URL structure. Google is now displaying results similar to breadcrumbs (used on many sites) so the user can determine which section the displayed page belongs in, so they can see where they are going, or possibly realise that you are after something more general, or looking for the category level. An example from Google’s Official Blog can be seen below:

If there are a number of different sub levels, the new hierarchy will display a truncated version of the results, hiding the intermediate levels. An example can be seen below, in that the results in the middle have been cut out.

Google’s goal from this is to help users find exactly what they want, not what Google wants them to see. As always Google holds some sway into what you see, but this will allow users to gain some level of freedom. These new changes put more stress on webmasters to ensure that each of the levels of the website features better content , and also that internal linking structure is setup in a way to best attract the search engines.