For those of you who read my posts regularly, you’ll know that I speak a lot about Google. And in particular, I speak a lot about an upcoming algorithm update being made by Google called “Caffeine.” Well, it would appear that this update may be starting to hit. Chris Crum from Web Pro News wrote an article today titled “Has Google Really Begun Changing How It Indexes The Web?” A fair question in which Chris responded that yes “it appears that more people are now seeing the effects from Caffeine out in the wild.” Chris went on to showcase several instances where it does indeed appear that Caffeine is changing things for his clients. We were curious too, so we took a look at about 10 of our current clients, however, and surprisingly did not notice anything unusual either way in regards to their rankings. In fact, most of our clients have remained consistent throughout the past few months. We know that Google announced that Caffeine would hit sometime after the holiday in an effort to keep webmasters sane and not disrupt holiday business. However, it is unclear whether or not this update has happened yet or if it is happening perhaps it is not yet widespread. In any case, we know for sure it is coming..so buckle up…it’s gonna be an interesting ride.
Posts Tagged ‘SEO’
It’s Caffeine Time…Or Is It?
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010How Google Personalization Will Change SEO
Thursday, December 24th, 2009Below is a list of ways that Google personalization is changing search engine optimization today:
• Everybody now sees different Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) based on their searching patterns making measuring a consistent ranking no longer possible.
• Content development simply for increased page count and link building no longer has as much influence on your site’s rank.
• People who visit their own sites are getting the wrong impression that their sites are ranking well in the SERPs and are stopping SEO services.
Other ways that Google personalization are changing optimization are listed below:
• People who visit their competitor’s sites are getting the wrong impression that their sites AREN’T ranking well in the SERPs and are blaming their SEO company.
• Search spam is starting to get filtered out as people, by and large, do not revisit spammy pages.
• Fresh content is becoming essential for rankings, as new pages stand out in someone’s personalized SERPs and are getting searchers to come back to your site. Social media content is now critical and is being done at increased levels.
Pay Per Click is also changing as a result of Google Personalization:
• PPC is becoming more popular as people find natural rankings too difficult to achieve and are abandoning it.
To be clear, Google personalization is a “game-changer” but it does not impact the most important aspect of Search Engine Optimization i.e. having a good website. Keep in mind that SEO never has nor ever will be just about your SERP ranking. Optimization is about improving your site so that it can perform better. Think about good usability, professional web design, and targeted on-point messaging, and you’ll see where Google is heading. With personalization everybody wins. Searchers get better, more relevant results and website owners that engage in search engine optimization will get better performing websites and thus better returns on their marketing investments.
To read more about Google personalization, please visit Google @ http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54068
Is SEO Dead?
Saturday, December 19th, 2009Three BIG announcements two weeks ago at the Googleplex has many wondering if the practice of “search engine optimization” is dead. We don’t think so but these changes will certainly impact the way you should go about optimizing your website.
- Real-time search – Google introduced real time which now pulls latest news stories from news feeds, blogs, and Twitter posts and lists these stories alongside your regular search results. How this impacts SEO: Real time indicates a swing that puts Social Media into the forefront. Your optimization efforts must now 100 percent include social media strategies or you’ll be missing the boat.
- Google Caffeine – Google will become much faster once they launch their latest update, called appropriately enough the Google “Caffeine” update. Sites that load quickly will place higher more often than not than sites that don’t. In addition to speed, this update will level the playing field by reducing the impact of your inbound links (since Google obviously knows that optimizers have literally been buying their way to the top) and will instead focus on good sites with good quality content. How this impacts SEO: Caffeine will ensure that sites that meet the needs of their target markets (judged by low bounce rates and audience engagement) will rank higher than those that don’t. This update will dramatically impact how we go about optimizing as more focus will be spent on web design, development, and content. Less focus will be made on tactics that optimizers have used for years such as link buying, link baiting, content development for the sole purpose of adding page counts. Black hat techniques will be rendered ineffective by this update clearing the way for legitimate websites to start ranking well on their own merits.
- Google Personalization – Google is now showing different results to different users, meaning your search results will likely be very different from my search results. Personalization has been around for years but now you get personalized results whether or not you are logged in to a Google account. How this impacts SEO: This spells the end of the road for the ranking report since rankings will vary based on geo-location, IP address, search history, etc. Instead, optimizers must now focus on creating sites that work. Optimizers that spend more time creating a better site are those that will find consistently high rankings regardless of personalization.
While SEO is absolutely not dead, some of the questionable practices that were created to give artificially high results for clients is finally gone (hurray!). The day has come where online marketers absolutely get to be online marketers. Optimizers that only know “how-to-fool” the search engines will soon be exposed and left for Interactive Agencies and online marketers that understand…marketing.
Google Wakes Up!
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009Maybe the name signifies a true wake up call but on August 10th, 2009 Google announced it will be launching changes to it’s search engine algorithm with it’s soon-to-launch “Caffeine” update. This update will be geared to compete more effectively with Social Media sites that provide “real-time search”, an important feature already employed at effectively Twitter and currently in-the-works at Facebook. Real-time search will allow searchers to obtain information as it happens, something the major search engines have always been very ineffective at providing. The true goal of the “Caffeine” update is to indexing content faster, something Google already does fairly quickly. According to the Google Webmaster Central Team, this update is “the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions”. Google is still testing the “Caffeine” update but look for it to roll out soon.
On another note, Google is now randomly experimenting with “bread crumbs” in their search engine results pages (SERPS). Bread crumbs, just like on e-commerce sites, provide links that help users know exactly what page they are on and gives them an ability to find their way back home. These are showing up randomly in the SERPS but look for a more aggressive roll out in the near future. This is an exciting feature set that will provide extra value to searchers. Way to go Google on this one!
Search Optimization: A New Look At Search Engine Optimization
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009Consider for a minute that “search engine optimization” should rightfully start being called “search optimization” and you’ll see where this thing is headed. In fact, the way we view and use search in our lives is rapidly starting to change. For example, new advances from the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing.com are not only speeding up the delivery of our results but providing a whole lot of new ways to view them. Soon-to-launch “real-time search” has been a mainstay on Twitter but is now being opened up on sites like Facebook to mobile search brought on by major advances in mobile technology like 3G and 4G, Many of us could not have predicted years ago that these would be the latest trends that are shaping the new search paradigm:
- Real-Time Search – How important is it to the engines that searchers be able to get results in real-time? So much so that each have inked deals with the social media sites to integrate their results into theirs. For a preview of what’s likely to come, check out www.bing.com/twitter. To get to real-time search, you’ll click the “Show options” link above the search results. Then you’ll see a “latest” option
- Search By Voice – Already integrated as an iPhone app, searchers talk into their phones and (usually) get relevant results back.
- Search By Location – Search for products in stock near you, for example ,
- Search By Site – Take or upload pictures and the engines will try to recognize the product, bar code, landmark etc. and provide relevant results for you.
A new decade is coming and along with it new search possibilities.
If you’d like to know how you can prepare yourself for these upcoming changes, feel free to contact me ron@sdinteractive.com.
Google Caffeine: What It May Mean To You
Monday, December 7th, 2009Google Caffeine, the “Next Generation” Search Engine from Google is coming soon. With it comes faster speeds for searchers but if you own a website do expect a likely change in your rankings to occur and perhaps a significant change to the way you currently optimize your website. While many of us were able to preview the “overhauled” engine this summer during beta, the test left us with many more questions than answers. Surely we knew that this new Google algorithm would prefer sites that loaded quickly but what about the other factors that have been a staple of website optimization for the past five years, or so? While we have still questions, we believe that there will be some major changes with this update that will once again level the playing field for everyone competing in this space. Below are some thoughts to the way the Google Caffeine update will change the SEO landscape for you:
- Site speed: They call it Google “Caffeine” for a reason. Sites that are fast and load quickly will tend to rank higher than those that don’t.
- More emphasis on on-page factors: Because every yahoo on the planet went and bought their way to the top by purchasing links, this new update will reward the small percent of people that played it straight. This update will favor factors such as good page design, proper meta tags, keyword density, low bounce rates, etc. Pages with broken links, links to bad neighborhoods, and poor page quality will not rank high any longer.
- Quality unique content: This, ultimately, will be the most important ingredient of a page and is another reason why on-page blogging should be at the top of everyone’s weekly to-do-lists.
- Number of social bookmarks: A page eventually will rank on its own merits by the number of social bookmarks it receives. There is going to be an increasing importance on social networking and lets say, how many tweets or del-icio-us votes a certain page gets before it can rank highly on Google.
A final word: It’s only speculation but the word on the street is that Google will finally be placing less importance on linking with the Google Caffeine update. Google is none to happy with the inequities that linking has had on their search engine results. Link building is a multi-billion dollar Industry and has literally changed the optimization Industry overnight. While Google has long since stated their displeasure for link buying, link buyers have generally enjoyed better rankings than those that don’t. ..that is hopefully until now.
Google Caffeine is supposed to launch sometime after the holidays. In the past, Google made updates to their algorithms during the holidays and many webmasters who depend on their rankings were impacted greatly. We will all be curious to see how this update will change the game plan for millions of website owners and search engine marketers alike.
If you witness anything strange with your results, please feel free to call us at 619-270-8155 to discuss. Until then, happy holidays and good luck to all!
A 12 Step Approach to Search Engine Optimization
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009We get a lot of requests from clients who want to know all the right steps for proper search engine optimization. While there is a ton of detail that go into each of these sections and often it takes experience and education to make a positive impact here, based on popular request we have simplified the SEO process accordingly. Below, please find and review SD Interactive’s 12 step approach to search engine optimization:
- Have a clear keyword strategy – What are the keywords you are optimizing for? This, above all else, will determine your SEO success. Choose your keywords carefully (traffic potential and competitiveness) and you are on your way. Once you have your keywords, get a list together so you can track and follow your progress. Also, good to know for linking priorities.
- Meta tag optimization – are your tags completely optimized? There are preferred limits set by the engines. Google, for example, will display up to 66 characters of a title tag, cropping at times to complete certain words. Do you have too many characters? Too many keywords in your title? Do you use keywords in your descriptions?
- Content optimization – is your content optimized? Are your keywords in your content? Do you cross-link? Do you use anchor text in your cross links? Are you images optimized? Do you have your keywords in your image name and alt text? Are your URL’s optimized? Are your keywords in your URL string? Do you have videos? Are they optimized? Do you have your keywords embedded into the video tags? Do you have a press release/media section? Is it optimized? Do you have a blog? Is it optimized?
- XML Sitemap, robots.txt files – Do you have these in place? If so, are they optimized and current?
- Site/Code optimization – Good code is a huge factor for ranking your site. How good is your code?
- X-Factors – How fast does your site load? How fast do your pictures load? Are your images compressed for quicker loading? FYI Slow load times alone can be an entire reason for not ranking better. Domain age – how long has your site been on the web? Also a huge factor in ranking. Legacy sites normally do better. How long is your commitment to your domain? If less than a year, not a good sign. Longer is better since legitimate businesses commit to the long term not the short term.
- Off-page optimization – Once your site is launched, you must engage in three things
link building 9) content development 10) social media marketing. More info listed below. - Link building – The most important part of off-page SEO is to obtain high quality, one way links to your website from relevant websites. There are a number of ways to get links but quality has now surpassed quantity – so look to obtain links from highly relevant, high Google PageRank sites. Over all other forms of link building, these produce the best results.
- Content development – Adding fresh content to your site is a win for your customers and for your rankings. Make sure you have a content development strategy and constantly add new pages of content to your site. Can be done via blog, static HTML pages, press releases, new home page stories, RSS feeds, etc but the content needs to be unique and not duplicated anywhere else on the site.
- Social media marketing – extremely important these days to “extend” your brand outside of your own web presence and social media allows you to do just that. For obtaining loyalty from existing customers, Social media does wonders. For SEO, however, the most important element to a Social Media Strategy is to get people to talk about you (and link about you).
- SEO reporting & analytics – the most important thing you can do is to track your results and their impact on your bottom line. Tying in an SEO report with your analytics is therefore critical these days. What good is it to rank #1 for a keyword that does not produce results. Instead, better to focus on words with better returns. There are many tool and analytic programs that can handle vast amounts of data to help you make better decisions with your marketing spends.
- Review and readjust – If you words aren’t working, make changes. You are never stuck with your original keyword decisions and can change them when necessary.
While admittedly simplified, following this 12 step approach to SEO should hopefully always point your SEO campaign in the right direction.
Profit Optimization is the Future!
Friday, August 28th, 2009Over the past ten years, I’ve been struggling to find a term that truly defines what it is we can do for our clients. We’ve tried terms such as ACR (aka acquisition, conversion, retention) but that described our process to online marketing more than it did the benefits. We also tried going after specific optimization terms (search engine optimization, ppc campaign optimization, conversion optimization, etc) but that approach always left us too niche and “type-cast” with our clients when we could do so much more for them beyond these single services. Now more and more, however, I have been speaking about “profit optimization” and have come to realize that this not only accurately describes what we can do for our clients but it is the future of our Industry.
So what exactly is profit optimization? Profit optimization, simply put, is where you boost your return on investment by coordinating your search data with your conversion/sales data . In other words, not all conversions are created equal. Some conversions will actually cost you money while others will generate healthy returns. Yet, all this time, we’ve been allocating equal priority to every conversion. With profit optimization, however, we can start making better choices about our marketing thresholds and spends.
So how do you start profit optimizing? Here are some tips:
- Establish a way to integrate search data with conversion data so you know which keyword drove the sale. Some simple ways to do this involve custom tags, unique phone number tracking, and dynamically generated landing pages. A more advanced way of doing this is through automatic data sync’s via API’s.
- Improve your reporting so that you know which conversion are of high value and which ones are of lesser quality. This is an extra step but the most crucuial. For example, a high value sale may have cost three times as much to acquire but the ROI is much better. The only way to know this is with this extra data point.
- Optimize your campaigns -Now that you have these critical technologies and reporting pieces in place, you can now make better decisions optimizing your SEO, PPC, and Online Advertising campaigns, your conversion optimization campaigns, and your retention campaigns. Once you know the high value targets, you can aggressively go after them, while minimizing the spends on the lower value ones.
While we are excited about all of the changes happening in the online space, we are most excited about profit optimization. Here, we finally get to the root of what online marketing is all about – the bottom line – and now we have the tactics and the technologies to make this a reality for all clients.
For Best ROI, SEO Is Still Your Clear Winner
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009It is not news that marketing budgets have been severely cut this year and that even paid search marketing allocations are in a slump. What is news, however, is the realization by companies that the so-called “free” search engine marketing program, i.e. search engine optimization, is returning large dividends for companies that are engaging in it. Because of the recession, companies have been forced to look at alternatives to their online marketing programs and, naturally, SEO becomes a lot more interesting now as it can be a low risk, high reward proposition in most cases.
Still, it amazes us that most people have balked at the costs or have not yet signed up for optimization services – even a decade after most people figured out that people, by and large, prefer organic listings over paid ones. The last statistic I read was that the organic listings get clicked over 80% of the time, whereas the paid ones only get 20%. This may be even higher now, as people have started to “get” that “paid listings” are from advertisers… and most people distrust or are skeptical of advertising.
To get your site optimized, you will need to begin with your website. What, we call – ‘on-page’ optimization. Included in these services is keyword research, selection, and assignment, meta tag development, content optimization, image optimization, URL optimization, site submissions, code optimization and several other key factors that will ensure that the search engines can find your site and properly index all of the pages of your site. For most Industries these days, however, on-page optimization is not enough to obtain and sustain rankings. The field has become too competitive and now even the smallest competitor is starting to figure the on-page part out.
Off-page optimization is now the quintessential component to a successful SEO program. In particular, the main question to ask is how “popular” is your site outside of your site? Included in off-page services are link building activities, social media marketing, online PR, directory inclusion, and many other factors critical to your success. There is also an “x factor” with optimization that may include the age of your domain and the length of commitment to your domain. If it all sounds greek to you, you can engage a company like ours to help you get through it all.
Eventually, I believe that all sites soon will be on-page optimized. Meaning, most people will eventually have all of the right keywords and codes in place to be found by the engines. What that means is that there is a huge opportunity in off-page optimization and the sooner you start engaging in those activities, the sooner you can create a gap between you and your nearest competitor.
SEO still represents the best Internet Marketing program because of the large ROI potential it represents. Even with all of the hype surrounding social media marketing, there is still no better way to get new customers than to meet them when they are ‘actively” seacrhing for your service in a search engine. Google is your new Yellow Pages and if you are not visibile in Google, you are missing the point of online marketing.
