“Netconcepts took away the headache of getting the site built so I didn’t have to manage it too closely.”
In March 2008 Blair Peach, Director of Marine Electronics launched their new ecommerce website, designed and built by Netconcepts, with the aim of shaking up the recreational marine industry online.
With many marine related websites in New Zealand being a “jack of all trades” by selling everything from ropes to wrenches, Marine Electronics differs by targeting the recreational fisherman and boat owner by being a price competitive specialist in marine electronics.
What is search engine optimisation? The usual reply is “oh, that’s placing keywords on the homepage of your website”. Truth is there is much more involved in optimising a website, and it is goes well beyond just the words on your pages. Indeed, where the end goal is to generate qualified traffic to a website to reach marketing objectives it does not necessarily mean that only your website needs to be optimised.
The term “Blended Search” represents the various online media and search products that can be found in search results today. Traditional web search is only one product offered by search engines. Other search media include images, video, news, people, maps, documents, directories, books and blogs.
Just a quick one to point out this post on the official Google blog by one of their ‘Google Fellows’, Amit Singhal. Of course it doesn’t dive too deep, but it is a good read if you are interested in the way Google works. I also find it interesting because it seems to signal an intent to be a bit more communicative with the marketplace…
As part of our effort to discuss search quality, I want to tell you more about the technologies behind our ranking. The core technology in our ranking system comes from the academic field of Information Retrieval (IR)…read more.
The post goes on to talk about one of my favorite topics, searcher intent, but one of the take aways for me was the reminder that Google not only has to solve the problem of indexing and understanding the content of pages on the web, but they also have to solve the problem of understanding search queries, which might be mispelled, have double meanings or be otherwise non-specific. Amit gives some great examples to illustrate these.
Big newsbroke in the search engine world last week…Flash files (.swf) can now be indexed by the major search engines. Flash developers will be rejoicing, but at the risk of being a killjoy I’m not sure this is really worthy of celebrating…
The news broke last week, but honestly it feels like more of a PR exercise for Adobe than any real break though in the search friendliness of Flash. Our recommendation is still to use Flash only for rich media, and leave content and navigation to HTML, which will always do a better job.
The announcement actually opens more questions than provides answers, and here’s a few reasons to remain cautious… Continue reading →
Baidu.com is the leading search engine in China with over 60% market share. Baidu also ranked third largest worldwide search property according to comScore, just behind Google sites and Yahoo! sites. China now has the largest Internet population in the world. By the end of 2008, China will reach 300 million Internet population and about 240 million search engine users. The Internet penetration rate is still low (about 20%), so I guess China could reach 400-500 million Internet users easily in the next few years to catch up to its 600 million mobile phone users.
Thus, Google won’t let Baidu take such a big piece of cake and remain happy with its current 20% market share in China. Google has partnered with China’s largest portal site Sina.com who used to use Baidu’s search technology and has also been the mobile search provider for China Mobile. Google is also going to invest a lot this year and beyond on advertising in China. They now have about 800 staff in China, but they will hire 200 or 300 staff each year in the next few years.
Last week Google teamed up with China’s most popular dictionary software – iCiba. iCiba has been the market leader for 10 years in the field and selling the dictionary software for about US$20 per copy. It has about 30 million loyal users. Google has bought it and started to offer the software for free. The 30 million user base will help Google to gain some market share and Google will also get some ad revenue from the built-in Google search function.
Yahoo! is a little quiet in the Chinese search market at the moment, although its partner Alibaba is doing great on B2B portal (Alibaba.com) and C2C auction site (Taobao.com). Microsoft is investing US$280 million to build a new research and development center in Beijing. The new R&D center is expected to accommodate 5,000 employees. There is a rumor that Microsoft is willing to invest in Baidu after its failure with Yahoo!.
It’s an interesting battle happening in China :-). At Netconcepts we’re keen to watch the developments as they unfold, but also keep our clients aware of the upcoming opportunities available in that online marketplace.
Debbie Mayo-Smith wrote an article today in the NZ Herald’s Business Herald paper titled “When Google seeks, make sure your website is what it discovers”. Unfortunately I can’t link to it right now because NZ Herald has not made this particular story available online.
Debbie makes good points that the typical brief when designing a website is “make my site look good” and that making a website search engine friendly is often not even considered throughout that process. It’s a shame because many businesses are investing a lot of money into their websites to find out that it is filled with good looking pictures and design, but it can not be accessed by search engines like Google.
Dave Cooper from Netconcepts was referred to by Debbie as being “brilliant” when he offered the following advice when building and marketing a website on the Internet…
Incoming links are the most important element
Use Words, not graphics
Make each page unique in keywords
The page title is the most important part of the page
Use heading attributes – search engines place importance on these
Give your homepage the most attention as it is the most important
Use keyword rich site maps
Do not use complex URL structures that include parameters like &, % and ?
These tips are only the basics of natural search marketing. As your website technology requirements become more complex and competitive within your online market, more advanced strategies are required to gain the visibility in search engines that generate bottom line results.
In the last of our SMX Sydney series we caught up with Danny Sullivan who shares some tips to get rankings in blended search along with keeping a balanced life in this crazy “always on” digital world.
Jacqui Jones: Hi, I’m Jacqui Jones from Netconcepts and we’re at SMX Sydney and today were speaking with Danny Sullivan and so, welcome to Australia and welcome to this side of the world.
Danny Sullivan: It’s good to be here. I’m squinting and crying because it’s so bright today.
Jacqui Jones: It is extremely bright. Well, thank you for your session today on blended search, it was very interesting. We have some questions that we’d like to ask you from the team back in the US. One of which is about images and so when you actually do a site query command in image search, will that actually bring up all the images that are typically indexed by Google?
Danny Sullivan: I honestly don’t remember, I’d have to go back and sit at the computer and take a look at it. Are you saying that if I do a site colon and that domain command and I’m in image search, does that narrow it down?
Jacqui Jones: Yes.
Danny Sullivan: I wanna say that it does, but sometimes the site command can be funky when you try to use it on some of the vertical searches, so I’d have to take a look and see.
Jacqui Jones: Can we then assume that if that is the case, does that mean that only those images would be displayed in blended search results?
Danny Sullivan: Yeah, I mean if those images aren’t in Google image search, there not going to be showing up in blended search results, so that certainly is a good way of to find out what’s likely to make it.
Jacqui Jones: Absolutely and so, images from Flickr and other image type sites would actually display in blended search results as well, won’t they?
Danny Sullivan: That’s right. I believe that Google can crawl Flickr and pick up the material that’s over there. I don’t think that they’ve blocked it, although you don’t tend to see a lot of Flickr showing up on Google, and then of course at Yahoo it is the opposite. They favour the Flickr photos. They’ve been pulling in the Flickr thing, so certainly if you’re trying to deal with blended search at Yahoo, you wanna have a Flickr account.
Jacqui Jones: One of the observations I’ve made is that the content or the text on the page actually puts the image into context and that actually affects the ranking of that image, do you think that’s the case at all?
Danny Sullivan: I believe that’s what certainly Google has said, that the content of the page can be associated with it. Usually it’s the words that are very near the image, definitely the Alt text. They’re very explicit about the Alt text being important as well.
Jacqui Jones: Ok, great. So were seeing a lot more other types of web assets and media appearing in blended search results such as video, so how would you go about getting your video to rank in Google, is it a matter of just pointing links at that video on YouTube or on Google video?
Danny Sullivan: Well, in the terms of blended search, they’re hitting both YouTube and the stuff that’s on Google video. As I was talking about, some people feel like they’re favouring that content. Since a lot of these places allow you to take the video content anyway, I would just go and put it out on as many places as possible. If you can have it on YouTube and you can have it on MySpace video, why not put it in both places, you can always choose to promote just one of those, if you want to go with it from there.
Jacqui Jones: If everyone is doing that, if a whole range of businesses in a particular industry are all putting video onto YouTube, Google video and other video sites, how do you actually make your video more important in search results, more relevant to that search query? Is it dependant on the ratings or the number of views of that video in YouTube or is it simply having some links with good anchor text in it, linking back to that video?
Danny Sullivan: I honestly don’t know what Google has said in terms of when they hit blended search, how they’re making that determination. I don’t think that they’re using things like the YouTube ratings. And the reason I’m fairly certain they’re not doing that is because they couldn’t use those YouTube ratings and then fairly weight all the other video content that’s out there as well. I would tend to think it’s going to be much more a combination of looking at the meta data from the video they have that’s been reported as well as looking at the anchor text they’re pointing over.
Jacqui Jones: We know that local search and maps is huge on the internet, and it’s made a huge impact on what people are seeing in search results and where they’re going to. Once maps and local search starts to become more popular and more business are being listed in local search how do you actually make it to the top 10 listings that are displayed there? Again, is it based on reviews or links going back?
Danny Sullivan: There’s a tonne of factors that come in. The proximity to say the city centre if you’ve done a generic city search, it’s coming up within that, certainly the words that are in the listings, the title of the business name can have an impact and it can bring you up there as well. In some cases, like I think with Yahoo that they did say that ratings could have an influence as well. I can’t recall if Google said the ratings have been. I mean local search tends to be a very, very complicated creature in terms of all the factor s that flow into it.
Jacqui Jones: The next question is on a personal note. I don’t know if you’ve heard that on blogs recently or on the news, that some bloggers they have had heart attacks or a couple of A list bloggers have had heart attacks and it’s because they haven’t had a balanced life. And I know for you, you’re busy traveling the world and blogging and you’re online all the time. How do you actually keep balance in your life?
Danny Sullivan: I saw that story in the New York Times and thought it was a lot of bull really. I mean we had one tech writer that actually died of a heart attack. Om Malik who runs GigaOM did have a heart attack. I don’t know that’s a wave of bloggers suddenly having… Om fortunately didn’t die and he’s well, but you know I think lots of people have unhealthy lifestyles. I don’t know that just because you’re a blogger that tends to do it. For me personally, I did notice about two years ago that you know, I spent a lot of time sitting in front of the computer, doing a lot snacking, not getting a lot of exercise, I suppose blogging, it’s just anyone using a computer a lot.
I just really started thinking more about what I was eating, trying to eat less and do a lot more exercise. It was around the time there was a lot of people talking about doing this blogger diet, so I got inspired by it. I remember Chris Pirillo had lost a lot of weight, and (Jeremy Wodney?) had done that, so it was kind of nice peer pressure to think, well I wanna go out and see if I can do something better. I guess my life does probably, you know health wise has improved a bit. I’m sure I’m not the healthiest person out there though.
Jacqui Jones: So, what does a blogger diet consist of?
Danny Sullivan: Well, I mean in my case, it wasn’t that I was eating the wrong things. I was just eating a lot. I mean I was doing a lot of snacking. I would get up and I would take a break and I’d have you know, just some candy or something like that and eat too much and I wasn’t getting a lot of exercise. I think on the traveling it’s harder, cause you’re traveling and you’re going through an airport and it’s very easy to say I’m gonna get a candy bar here and I’m gonna grab a thing there. You go into a reception here and there’s a lot of food that’s out and you go oh I’ll have this muffin and pick up something like that, so for me that’s just more a lot of saying no.
Jacqui Jones: Very good. One last question. What do you think are the main challenges for search in Australia and New Zealand?
Danny Sullivan: You know it’s difficult to say, cause I’m not down here. I’ve really been talking with a lot of people already. The top of my head, I would say one of the biggest challenges is, you’re not getting as much support as of some of the new things that are coming out. There’s Local (search) that’s out there, that felt like from talking to some people that they didn’t have as much support. They did have a local business though, they were pleased about that. There’s no product search for Australia and they’ve had product search at Google for like 5 years now. So where, you know the heck is it?
It’s not like the people in the room that we were talking with didn’t have products to sell. There’s just no ability to put it out there. This is my 3rd trip to Australia and talking with people, unfortunately you seem to get use to being forgotten sometimes. You know, “we’ll get to you when we get to you”.
At least on the last trip I came out, it was still a case you couldn’t even buy the paid links, you know, so I guess there’s advancement there. They want to take your money now. You couldn’t even give your money away to them at the time.
Jacqui Jones: I think your observations are right, that sometimes we do feel a bit forgotten, but things are catching up and there’s a lot more happening down this side of the world, which is fantastic. Thank you for your time today and I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in Sydney.
Danny Sullivan: Definitely looking forward to it, you’re welcome.
In our second video from our series of SMX Sydney interviews, we speak with Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz on seo tools, link building and social networking.
Jacqui: Hi, I’m Jacqui Jones from Netconcepts and we’re at SMX Sydney and we have Rand Fishkin right here from SEOmoz.
Rand: Hi, How are you Jacqui?
Jacqui: Welcome to Australia.
Rand: Thank you.
Jacqui: It’s a bit bright isn’t it? It’s very sunny.
Rand: I think this is just about the best weather I’ve had at a conference. Maybe one of the best cities too, it’s incredible here.
Jacqui: That’s a lovely thing to say. As I just mentioned, one of our analysts in our US office, she wanted to ask a question about the sluggish-nish of your web site, so what is the case?
Rand: There are a few issues with SEOmoz. One is it was not built to handle the traffic that it gets right now. It was architected for maybe a max of 10,000 visits a day and it gets close to 15-20,000 on a lot of days. The other thing is the tools slow it down heavily. So as the tools have gotten more popular, that’s a tonne of database requests and it’s a tonne of pulling data from other places. One of the biggest problems was, I think a couple of weeks ago was running super slow, and were going what the heck’s going on, and we found this spammer in Singapore had like signed up for a tonne of accounts and was running like 50 tools at a time, so we’re constantly monitoring for that kind of thing. So, November we’re going to co-locate hosting in New York and Seattle. Were gonna have a new version of the site which runs a lot faster. Hopefully it will get better.
Jacqui: Ok, so in the meantime, you know, do we just have to persevere?
Rand: Yeah, I would say visit it during, no you shouldn’t have to do anything. It’s ridiculous to ask people to not like, come and visit. I mean were doing the best we can and I do apologise for the sluggish-nish. I promise it’s totally worth it dude, just you know, come on over.
Jacqui: Another question I have is how did you come up with the name SEOmoz? What does moz actually mean?
Rand: So, we stole it from the Mozilla foundation, and Chef Moz and DMOZ and all of those sites. So, they had this philosophy that we just loved, which was of openness and of sharing a lot of robust, free content. And we’ve always subscribed to that moto. So even though we have paid stuff, kind of behind the pro membership, there is thousands and thousands of pieces of great free content on SEOmoz. There’s a lot of stuff that users contribute themselves through YOUmoz, through the market place. All that kinda thing so, yeah, we took it from the kind of ethos of openness.
Jacqui: You’ve got a range of professional analytic tools available on SEOmoz. Can you tell us a little bit about what they are?
Rand: Sure, so I mean there’s a tonne of them, but one of the ones, how about I’ll tell you about one of the new ones, one of the ones that’s coming out, that no one has seen yet! So, in, what’s it gonna be, it’s June 3rd I think it launches, and it’s, I don’t know, we haven’t come up with a name yet, maybe like the video watchers can help us, you can help us come up with a name for it. Internally we call it the Trifector tool. So, it is page strength, which has been probably our most popular tool right, which gets a bunch of factors about your web site from the search engines, from Yahoo, from Google, from Alexa, all these places and then comes up with kinda score of how important we think you are. And, we took that one step further and said you know, page analysis is fine, but for a lot of time we need to analyse a whole domain, and other times we wanna… there’s blogs right and we specifically want to break out blogs, so we have page strength, blog strength and domain strength, thus we call it Trifector right, and so that is launching June 3rd. We have a tonne of tools in there, but I think this one is going to be huge, it’s gonna be very, very popular.
Jacqui: We’re looking forward to seeing that being launched. A question from one of our analysts Tim in our US office… he wants to know, can you actually add more than one site to the pro analytics tool.
Rand: You can’t right now, but you’ll be able to add five sites in total, so your site like plus four top competitors starting May, I think its like, May 20th, May 25th, something like that. We launched it in a preview Beta mode, knowing that’s what folks would want. We all ready have internally, some stuff where you can see like four sites at a different time. You can see oh well, Search Engine Land is going up and SEOmoz is going down, and oh we have to catch up to that Danny bastard, you know, yeah.
Jacqui: So what do you think what are some of the greatest challenges in search for Australia and New Zealand and I appreciate you have only been here for 5 minutes, but what are your observations so far?
Rand: I have a really good friend who’s based here in Australia and he spent a week with us at SEOmoz. Lucas Ng from Fairfax digital and I think he’s just brilliant, absolutely brilliant about SEO stuff and he commented that Australia and New Zealand are always about a year behind the US in terms of technology. Everything from Ajax, to social media marketing, to Twitter, you know, to Digg, or whatever it is, their always kind of a little bit behind, and so I think it can be tough to come to some of these presentations and to hear these tactics described and then say to yourself, ok we’re not quite there yet, but this does gives us an opportunity to be on the cutting edge.
Obviously some of the other things are it’s really tough to network from Australia, in person networking is extremely hard because it’s so far to fly to you know, London, or to Los Angeles, or San Francisco or New York, I mean these are just far, far away destinations, and so I think that there’s a lot of opportunity therefore in the power of social networking. I mean I had, you know, I had never met, Colina Jordan until I came here, but she was a huge name for me and the same is true with Barry Smyth and you know a lot of the other folks who are here. I knew them through the social profiles and media that they contributed to and participated online, so I think that recognising that challenge and also that opportunity.
Jacqui: Great, so for those particular people, they would want to have an international profile to network with people like yourselves and others in the industry in the States. So for businesses in Australia and New Zealand where they primarily want Australian and New Zealand business and traffic, if they were to participate in social media sites in the US, does that really provide a lot of benefit to them?
Rand: So, probably not quite as great as the other side, however that being said, if you participate in those sites, you can probably earn links that none of your competition will have and you can earn this branding outside of what your competitors can get. And that will help you right, so all of those links will help you to rank well for queries even here in Australia. You’ll earn that trust and the authoritative domain status and all these kind of things and then when your competitors are you know, struggling, they might say, oh man how did they get those links, how can I get those links and that’s a pretty powerful thing.
Jacqui: If you are generating global links, does that really benefit your site? I mean surely regional links will be better than a global link?
Rand: Not necessarily, not entirely. There’s something to this idea that authoritative domains gather links from all different countries, all different languages and recognising that is going to be really important. SEOmoz is a good example. Once we started getting links from Germany, from the UK, from Canada, from Australia, from Singapore, from China, and we look at all these different markets and said oh my gosh like this is really establishing us as an authority on the web on this subject and it means that our rankings are going to increase in the US as well as overseas. Let’s say you want to say target Singapore, getting links in Singapore is absolutely very important, but if you’re working here in Australia and you’ve got an Australian domain and you have lots of Australian links already and now you’re trying to expand your link profile, going international can be a great, great help.
Jacqui: We’ve been speaking with a range of PR consultants recently, and they’re just starting to learn about social media and PR online which is great and one of the question they ask is well, how do you actually value a link because they’re so use to when they get a mention in a newspaper article, they can put a dollar value on that, so how do you actually value a link? Is that possible?
Rand: Not, not right now, not, at least not from the prospective of this helped me this much to get the rankings that I want. I think you can do it arbitrarily and you can do it a little bit, you can kinda say, hey we through out this piece of content, it got this many links, it’s earned us this much traffic and referrers to that page sent us this many conversions. You might be able to puzzle out something, but chances are it’s gonna be a low ball. I think that low ball number is probably an ok thing to use, but yeah it’s a very, very tough thing to do because you don’t know whether that link is going to be, oh hey that increased my trust rank, that increased my page rank this much. I think that eventually there will be tools that will help us to analyse those.
Jacqui: Great, well that’s all the questions I have for today, so thank you very much, and enjoy the rest of your time in Australia and also New Zealand when you go there next week, so thank you.
At SMX in Sydney I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing a range of professionals in the search marketing space. Over the next few days we will be delivering some of the video interviews that we conducted. The first in the series is with Monte Huebsch from AussieWeb where we discuss the state of local search in Australia and New Zealand.
Jacqui: Hi, I’m Jacqui Jones from Netconcepts and we’re at SMX in fabulous Sydney. Right now we’re speaking with Monte Heubsch from AussieWeb. How are you?
Monte: I’m great Jacqui, thanks for talking with me.
Jacqui: So you’re originally from Brisbane aren’t you and you’ve flown down to Sydney for the SMX conference?
Monte: Yes, we came down. This is the largest international conference of its type in the southern hemisphere with 200 plus people, people from New Zealand like yourself. I’ve got a yank accent, but, yes, I’m from Brisbane.
Jacqui: Is it possible that you can tell us a little bit about AussieWeb and what you do?
Monte: AussieWeb is a local search and business directory with 1.2 million Australian businesses in it. It’s the 5th largest directory in Australia. People who are larger than us are who you’d expect like Google, Yellow Pages and TrueLocal which provide the data for both Google and Yahoo!.
Jacqui: What is the status of local search in Australia and New Zealand if you know that?
Monte: Local search is in its infancy and is just beginning to grow. All the searches that were done historically in the past, and even Google recognises this because we partner with Google, you’ve used Google and found what you wanted and you have bookmarked all those sites and so you do less searches unless you have a new problem. Now people are using the Internet to find local businesses.
They are doing research on the Internet and finding a local company and not completing the transaction online, but they are buying local. In fact 62% of online purchases are influenced by online research.
Case in point, if you search for an Apple computer, an iPod or an iTouch you might find the Apple website, however you might not want to buy online and wait 3 days for it to be delivered. You want to find the local outlet, find out whether they have the stock of the phone or iTouch you want and then go buy it. Actually, local search is a percentage of general searches growing at a faster rate now.
Jacqui: Sorry, did you just mention before that you supply some of the data to Google and Yahoo!? Is that correct?
Monte: No, TrueLocal is the provider of the data. It is owned by Rupert Murdoch and they provide in Australia the data to Yahoo! and Google business directories. Google actually takes their data from multiple sources so they will have restaurant reviews from a restaurant review site. We provide Google with an xml feed if they think that data is useful so they use our data as well.
Jacqui: Do you think that over time that by Google’s local search and maps technology becoming more popular will possibly make local directories such as AussieWeb and local search redundant at all?
Monte: Good question Jacqui, it’s a valid one. Of all the major directories in Australia of which there are about 8, there are only two that are considered Web 2.0 and what I really mean is that they are free which are Google and ourselves. All the rest of the directories have premium listings and charge anything from $800 to $8,000 to participate. TrueLocal is a good case in point. They are an $800 a year product and if you list in TrueLocal, you automatically show up in Google and Yahoo!, as well as TrueLocal.com.au. That’s a paid environment and there is a big difference between paid and free. I don’t think we’ll go out of business just yet.
Jacqui: What do you think are some of the greatest challenges for businesses in Australia and New Zealand in regards to search?
Monte: The challenge in either country is the same and that is that there are so many new businesses starting every year and there are also so many businesses that exist and then go out of business. The number is around 40%. So keeping your directory base current and accurate is the biggest challenge and the way we get around that we have a button on AussieWeb’s site that says “report this listing as wrong”.
If someone goes and says “hey that business is longer down the street or they have closed or changed their name”, we’re actually using our users like a wiki to provide information to keep our directories fresh and current. That is our greatest challenge.
Jacqui: What are your top tips or what do you see happening in the future or what would like to see happen in local search?
Monte: We just did a seminar session with all the search players, competitors and friends alike, all got together and spoke about that. Google is a good case in point, where they have just added video, where you can link video to your local search listing and I think you’re going to find rich content coming along.
The ability for a small company who may not even have a website, having a directory listing that includes pictures, a map to get there, directions, a video, it literally becomes their web presence. And having that in multiple locations is valuable and the cost of being on virtually every directory in Australia of consequence, except maybe Yellow, is a few thousand dollars and that is probably better money spent than building a website which small businesses are time poor and do not have the ability to maintain and operate.
Jacqui: Absolutely. They are all the questions that I have for you today. Thank you for speaking with us at Netconcepts and I look forward to catching up with you again soon.
Monte: We hope to catch up with you in New Zealand.
Recently some of the marketing team here at Netconcepts attended SMX Sydney, a two-day search engine marketing expo held at Luna Park overlooking Sydney’s harbour. The conference had an international guest speaker lineup and a range of sessions suited to the industry newbie through to the more seasoned search marketer.
The following are some of the interesting learnings I took away from the event:
Signals used by the search engines to determine search quality has evolved over time in the following way:
Search 1.0 – On page factors, keywords etc which lead to spamming, keyword stuffing etc.
Search 2.0 – Off page factors, inbound links & click through.
Search 3.0 – Universal/Blended Search (where we’re at now).
Search 4.0 -Personalised and Social Search.
Search 5.0 – Human editors, human refinement.
Google’s ‘Universal Search’, the blending of results from a range of search verticals such as images, videos, news, maps and blogs, has proven to be successful.
Image Search – Google automatically indexes all images (unless there’s a robots.txt file) and attributes a loose PageRank score. Image rankings are influenced by the ALT tags, descriptive filenames and text surrounding the image. Google News Search – Check out Google’s Help for Publishers for info on submitting your site to Google News.
Google Blog Search – Get a XML site map, use RSS feeds.
Google Maps/Local Search – It is important to claim and optimise meta data on Google Maps for your local business listings as anyone can claim it. You need a physical address to do so, if you don’t have one get a PO Box.
The rate of blended search results will continue with the addition of books, products, patents and scholar search next on the list.
The future of Search is Personalisation and Social Search.
The aim of Personalised Search, which is already happening, is for search engines to know more about you in order to offer better, more relevant search results. Google will look at context, web search history, previous clicks, location and your previous search query when displaying search results. Google will also use signals from your Google accounts including iGoogle and Google bookmarks.
The discussion on ‘previous search query‘ was particularly interesting, as this will soon affect organic rankings regardless of whether or not you’re signed in to a Google account. Soon, everyone that accepts a cookie will see their search results alter, depending on what their previous search query was. For example, searching for ‘New Zealand’ and then for ‘travel’ will return search results as if you’d searched for ‘New Zealand Travel’.
Social Search may be on the horizon.
Search engines may eventually look to use your social networks and social influences to refine and personalise your search results further. There are still a lot of unknowns on how they will actually do this, such as determining which people in your networks will be the influencers and who your ‘true’ friends are.
Google’s recent roll out of the ‘Search within Site’ feature has had mixed reviews from marketers and site owners.
‘Search within Site’ is the addition of a search box within the search results allowing you to search a site while still on the Google search page. The new service is typically evident with large retail based sites such as the following example for Trademe.
The concerns surrounding this feature are that when you perform a ‘search within a site’, the results are produced along with competitor paid search ads raising issues of brand cannabalisation. Furthermore, affected sites feel they are loosing valuable user data which would have been captured by their internal site search boxes.
Google’s defense is that they have data indicating their users do in fact like the new feature, but it isn’t necessarily permanent and may be discontinued is user dissatisfaction is evident.
A handy tool – if you want to force Google to display search and PPC results for another country, add &gl=us to the end of your search query for U.S results, &gl=uk for United Kingdom and &gl=au for Australia etc.
SMX Sydney proved to be a successful and worthwhile event. There were numerous insights gleaned and the venue itself made for a memorable experience.
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