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.