It was reported on the Google Webmaster Central blog by Vanessa Fox that the search results for Google Site Map users will be updated weekly. In the past, this only occurred every three weeks. Where a user could see what their average position was for the most searched terms that their site was represented in the SERPs for over a three week average. The stats they show are based on the queries that most often return your site in the results. Now web masters will be able to get fresher and more accurate data as the three week time frame did not account for any quick changes based on optimization that an SEO may perform. These updates will happen every Monday. However, the blog did not indicate any specific or set time.
In today’s fast passed ever changing world, more and more we find ourselves browsing the Internet not at home and not even at the office, but from our cell phones, PDAs, and other wireless devices. We may be on the subway, bus, walking down the street, even sitting down to lunch. As this trend continues, web developers have been creating web sites geared to this audience. New Mobil-based web sites have hit the main stream. Now to complement those Mobil sites, web site owners can register the .Mobi extension. This is short for Mobil. In the first week alone over 75,000 domains were registered for web sites all over the world. The Wall Street Journal reported The U.S., Canada and China topped the list of countries with the most registrations, followed by a few European countries and Japan.
Today marks a milestone for Google; it is Google’s 8th birthday. It is hard to believe it, but the search giant has been around for almost a decade. I can remember not so long ago, when my favorite engine was Lycos.com followed by www.Excite.com. I would use Yahoo every now and then, but not too much. Then one day, in 2001, a friend told me about this site, Google.com. I remember thinking to myself. This will never take off, no pictures, no banners, and so many great search engines out there, like the ones I use, plus dogpile, northern lights, web crawler, etc. Well, I am happy to admit when I am wrong and boy, was I wrong on that one.
Google wrote on its history page (http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html), “Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake. “
Google’s comparison-shopping search service is going to be moving from Froogle to the Google main SERPs. The main search engine will soon query Google Base to generate the most relevant products to the user’s search. “Google Base was introduced last November as a service for individuals and organizations to post content to the Google search index, including products for sale.” Writes Google in their product description. As a point of emphasis that Google Base will be used as a data feed and not a search service on its own, Google has removed the search box entirely form the Google Base interface.
Google is doing this because; Froogle is just not cutting it as an additional search service. Most users search the main Google search engine only, thus it does make sense for the Mountain View search giant to shift the focus of comparison shopping. The actual process a user will go through is: When a search for products occurs, Google will present the user with a second search box to hone their search.
The enhanced product search would certainly make sense from a revenue standpoint. Even though Google may not be charging for products to show up in this way, more users will search on key terms that will display the intended result. This will likely drive more purchase related search, which will generate more ad word clicks and a higher merchant conversion rate, at least in theory.
For some time now, www.zillow.com, has been a web site that realtors, sellers and consumers have used to determine the market value of their property. Until now, the property values, known as “Zestimates” were derived from public information. However, Zillow recently included a personalization features and the capability for property owners to distribute information on their property. In addition, users can track homes and save other content to a detail page of their own on the web site.
The new features are very much a way to add the human element to the results, which will effect how a property search will be displayed. This also will add valuable content to the web site which allows human interaction with the web database to provide a means to increase its search rankings in the major engines. In addition to the human added content, Zillow is further becoming a resource for the consumer by adding the functionality to map by color the price per square foot of any area in the country. This new feature can only increase the way search engines look at this resource site. It would be advantageous for any other real estate or any other comparative shopping site to follow in Zillow’s lead and bring the user into the web site building process.
I thought with all the great press that social search is getting, it would be easy to explain and convince non SEOs and other non technical people how to and why they should use sites like, Flickr and del.ico.us. However, I found out this is not the case.
I recently had a conversation with my 56 year old father. He has had computers since the mid 1980's, and was on Prodigy and AOL back in 1988 before there was an internet. However, even someone as forward thinking as he, could not grasp the concept of shared book marks. He said, "Why should I let anyone else know what web sites I am looking at" and "Why do I care to add keywords to a site, isn't that your job?". I tried to explain the benefits of social search, but I fear in today's post 9/11 clamp down by the government on all of our civil rights, and with all the rumors of big brother watching over us, my father is of the attitude to not give up anymore of his privacy.
Well, I guess I will keep working on him, and for those of you who read my daily posts, find someone just like my dad, and try to convince them.
In the past, you could optimize your adword campaign by simply having a higher click rate and bidding more than your competition. However, Google has announced that it will start to take the relevance of web sites into consideration when assigning the order of a SERPs adwords. This has the added issue now of not just bidding up your ad words, but successful PPC campaigns will need to use some natural SEO techniques. To get the best placement now, you may be able to cut some of your cost per click by having the right tile tags, headlines and keywords in your content.
This is especially good news for the smaller business, in light of recent PPC statistics. These stats claim the average search ad’s cost has increased 37% from January 2005 to January 2006 Many well-funded companies have used adwords as a branding tool, and any sales which came out of their campaigns were looked at as a bonus. This practice had the potential to force the “small guy” out of the Google ad market.
A Belgian court has told Google they can no longer add news stories form Belgian, French and German news papers. If Google does not stop adding the news content to its service, Google will be fined $1.27 million dollars per day.
This might be looked at as a major legal victory for author rights in the copyright field, but the news sources are loosing not only publicity from their stories being featured in one of the largest read news portals on the planet, but also they are loosing out on much needed and coveted inbound links from one of the most trusted sources on the web, Google News. It will be interesting to see if the web sites from those affected will decrease for high traffic terms. My guess is, this will happen rather quickly, and this so called legal victory, may turn into a marketing disaster!
Site Pro News recently published an article, written by Scott Buresh, to help companies decide whether to conduct an SEO or PPC campaign if their budget is restricted. This article cited many great statistics, which I would like to bring to light:
50 % of users begin their search by scanning the top organic results
30 % of search engine users click on paid listings
78 % of all respondents claim that they found the information they were searching for through sponsored links just 40% of the time.
The overall conversion rate is 17 & higher for unpaid search results than the rate for paid (4.2% vs. 3.6%).
With these stats in mind, it might seem as if an SEO campaign is the way to go, but it should also be pointed out that your ROI is much easier to measure with a PPC campaign, and in many cases, a PPC campaign can cost you less to start.
It is now not only a smart move on the part of web developers to make sure their web site is compliant with the ADA and W3C standards for search engine ranking, but there is now a legal reason to do so. A California judge has allowed a case against the retail store; target’s web site must make their web site accessible to the blind under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Google states in their web master guidelines that this should be so, and now it seems the judicial system agrees with the search juggernaut. It seems rather strange, if you think about it. Through its marketing promotions, Target seeks to reach greater numbers of customers and increase its customer-base, while on the other hand it seeks to make its web site difficult if not impossible for many of its potential customers to access.
Based on W3C standards, what Target must do is make sure all images on the site have alt tags. Their must be no textual images without these tags, and text needs to be formatted with cascading style sheets. They need to use image map and text for hotspots. Provide captioning and transcripts of audio, and descriptions of video. Provide alternative content in case active features are inaccessible or unsupported.
In the spirit of inspiring others, Rock Coast Media is starting a contest which will end on Oct 31, 2006. We are looking for great link bait ideas to share with our blog readers. We are looking for the most interesting link bait ideas, whether they invlolve programming, article topics, other contests etc. We will select the best idea (subjectively selected by Mike Goldstein, our SEO Manager) and provide that person with a free SEO recommendation on optimizing their site for up to 20 keywords.
Remember when SEO was as simple as add good title tags, stuff your meta tags and page content with keywords and create a door way page and let the engines move you up and up. Well those days are long gone. Many of the techniques we used back in the 1996 infancy of the Internet not only do not work well any more, but most are now considered “black hat”. Just as SEO has changed to a more complex game, of specialized content, RSS feeds, social search, strategic link building and more, so has web development. There are several reasons web design and development has grown, but the most significant reason is how much more accessible the web is today. There has been the wireless revolution such as cell phones, palm tops, laptops, and even computer screens in automobiles, now come equipped with access to the internet and email.
Now we have web 2.0, which uses all the aspects of social search, RSS feeds and the new kid on the block AJAX, which is a process to combine multiple programming languages. In addition, web sites are now powered by databases and XML files which can change certain parts of a web page without reloading the entire page. This brings its own new challenges to SEO, where a single URL can now display different content all the time. It is like reverse duplicate content. This makes it very hard for a search engine to index a page with content, where the page very rarely will look the same. It also brings the problem of one page web sites. Just like Flash is an SEO challenge because content can not be indexed, Ajax has a similar, issue. The difference between flash and Ajax is that Ajax uses XHTML, and its content can at least be recognized by the search engines, its links can be followed and its alt tags can be read.
These new techniques in web development have great advantages for users. However, their are significant drawbacks as well that developer really need to think about, especially those who are not savvy to the ways of search. The drawbacks are that it can sometimes inhibit the use of the back button on the web browser, and sometimes the code has a problem initiating the response that it has been programmed to produce.
With all the talk on this and other blogs recently regarding social search, I thought I would try to create my own "link bait" if you will. So please feel free to bookmark this posting. I have conducted some research into the top social search sites on the web. Those sites and links can be found below: These sites allow you to save bookmarks online and Tag the sites with keywords instead of saving them as bookmarks in the favorites list of your browser.
The world of SEO is getting bigger every day thanks to the aggressive push of social search. Yahoo is leading the pack with all of their newly acquired companies who pioneered the new wave of social search. Primary among these web sites is Flickr. This is a shared photo site, where users can post their photos, tag them for easy search and allow other member of the Flickr community to rate and discuss the photos.
This all seems like a nice idea for photo buffs. However, now that Yahoo owns the site, there is a significant SEO benefit to be had; maybe. If you search on a term such as travel photography, above the organic results, you may see 3 photos which come from Flickr. These photos then link to Flickr and of course a potential web site from the photographer or creative owner. For example, a photo might lead to a beach resort. This obviously could become a good source for new inbound links and even highly ranked sites with their photos, if properly tagged and voted on by enough of the Flickr community.
So what’s the rub? Well, you must be logged into some Yahoo service to see these photos. If you are not, then you only see the text links. This is the same for Yahoo Answers, a Q & A site owned by Yahoo.
What this means to me, is that Yahoo is going to benefit from sites like, myweb, Flickr, Yahoo Answers and Trip Planner. However, since the Googlebot and MSNbot are not members of any Yahoo product, they will never see those links, and as such, even if the links make it into the Yahoo directory, the SEO benefit will be limited to Yahoo results only.
