Google Rolls Out “Place Search”; Major Implications for SEO
Posted in: Internet Marketing Buzz Words, Search Engine Optimization by Sol on October 28, 2010 | No Comments
Today, Google rolled out their new “Place Search” – the way it displays results, with a heavy emphasis on local search results. From now on, it appears that searches that are local specific (i.e. pizza shops in Toronto) will have local search results displayed much more prominently.
What this means is that most of the results on the page are from Google Places listings (the one with the map, and the red push pins). It means that organic results will be pushed further down the page. This change has major implications for local business searches. It is a game-changing development.
You can read a very good explanation about Google’s Place Search – click here.
We will of course examine this further, study its implications and be sure to gain an understanding of how this will affect each specific client. We will provide you with continued guidance in your site optimization efforts.
Remember, this is the world of SEO – ongoing development and continual changes - at a very fast pace. It’s what makes the internet so challenging and exciting.
Feel free to contact us directly with any questions.
Improve Page Speed – Improve Page Rank
Posted in: Internet Marketing Buzz Words, Search Engine Optimization by Fran on September 12, 2010 | No Comments
In its ongoing, leading role as the ultimate decider of how the web should perform, Google now looks at Page Speed (the speed at which a particular page loads) as a very important parameter in assessing page rank and site rank. They are trying to reward sites, and thus encourage sites to be faster. Though we cannot not know exactly how important this parameter is, Google is providing tools to address it and talking about it openly – something it does not normally do.
This is an introduction to the Page Speed tool. Watching this video will not make you an expert. In fact it is quite technical and the activities that it shows may have to be done by your site’s programmer. But this video will alert you to the potential and usefulness of this SEO tool, if you are not already convinced. We present it here as a service. This is vitally important for every website, especially if yours is heavy with images and videos. We encourage all our clients to address their site’s page speed to the best of their ability. If Google is telling us to do this, and promoting a tool to do it, it behooves us to listen carefully.
Facebook as a Search Engine?
Posted in: Internet Marketing Buzz Words, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing by Sol on April 12, 2010 | No Comments
In late March, there was a lot of buzz in online marketing circles about a report coming from Hitwise – For one week in March, people visited Facebook more often than Google.
Search Engine Optimization experts are quick to point out that this is not the first time this happened. In fact, it already occurred in late December 2009 during the holiday season. Either way, the message is clear. Facebook has changed the rules of the online marketing game.
Social Media Marketing is a tactic that companies are actively engaging in. Anybody with a product or service to sell will execute all the best online marketing strategies to get the message out there. Companies are now allocating significant social media marketing budgets, outspending search engine optimization and online display advertising (see Marketing Sherpa). To us in the online industry this is not news.
Social Media Marketing Share of Online Marketing Budget
What is news, is that we (I mean the Royal WE), online searchers are en masse behaving in a way that validates social media marketing. It is natural for us to do our searches via search engines. That’s what they’re there for. But it appears that the concept of social media – people congregating online according to shared interests – is offering us the opportunity to search for information in a new way. It gives us the opportunity to do more than just search. It allows us to converse, interact or create online relationships. We can trust the results of our search much more profoundly when we know it is coming from a community of peers. It is our willful, enthusiastic and active participation in social media that makes this such a compelling online marketing opportunity.
Facebook and other social media sites are not just other search engines fighting for market share, as are yahoo or Bing, for example. They are not search engines with a better search algorithm, faster results or a more usable interface. Rather, they are a completely different animal. Having said that, it appears this creature is evolving into, and taking over the online marketing industry.
I don’t think Google should be too worried just yet. The search engine is here to stay (for now). However, it is interesting to note that in researching this post, I looked up “facebook search” and “facebook marketing” and other similar terms in Google’s Keyword tool. “Facebook search” showed 1,000,000 searches in March. Amazingly, for the term “facebook marketing” I received “not enough data” in local search volume for the US.
Could it be? Or is a certain Goliath-like company feeling the heat?
I went straight to Facebook and searched for “facebook marketing”. I instantly found a page called Facebook Marketing Solutions – http://www.facebook.com/marketing. This page has over 207,000 fans! There are some fascinating case studies on this page, but be careful as some will take you away from Facebook. One article of note is Use your Mobile Phone to publish to Facebook fans! (esp. Blackberry or iPhone).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been the key to online success. While SEO is still the crucial element in online marketing, Social Media Optimization (SMO) is another critical tactic that should not be overlooked, and I would venture to say that it is now equally important if you are involved in marketing online and need to create a relationship with your (potential) customers.
5 Free Internet Marketing Tools
Posted in: Internet Marketing Buzz Words, Market Research, Search Engine Optimization by Fran on December 29, 2009 | No Comments
In a previous post “Effective Online Market Research – But Are You Listening?” we dealt with the need for effective market research in order to execute internet marketing online. The challenge, we maintain, is not in doing the research but in implementing the marketing strategy after the demographic is understood.
Many small companies or fledgling businesses will balk at spending their resources on tailoring their marketing strategies, assuming that they know the mind set of their customers. Fortunately, there are some very good free internet marketing tools out there. Some of these tools are very popular – and yet underutilized.
The following are 5 internet marketing tools that most websites can benefit from. Even if you are already familiar with these tools, we recommend taking a deeper look and becoming proficient with some of the lesser known functionality in order to help you achieve your marketing and strategic goals – without paying a fortune.
The last tool in our list (it should be introduced with “last but not least”) should get your special attention, especially in light of our premise that most online businesses think they know what their users want. By using online surveys and polls, even budget-conscious companies can now get to the pulse of the people without spending a bundle on a market research firm.
Perhaps, the money saved can be better used for PPC – to be addressed in a future post.
5 Free Internet Marketing Tools
- Web traffic metric sites like Alexa http://www.alexa.com/ provide “free web traffic metrics, top site lists, site demographics, hot urls and more”. Simply type in the URL of your biggest competitors to learn about who their visitors are and get insight into their online behavior.
- Google Insights For Search allows you to “compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties” http://www.google.com/insights/search/ . Here too, add the URL of your biggest competitors to get a cartload of relevant information.
- Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends “provides insights into broad search patterns” and shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. Popularity is broken down by region, city and language and time period.
- Google Adword Keyword Tool https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal allows you to find out the hottest key words and phrases in your industry and later will be the most effective tool to construct a website marketing campaign.
- Create free online surveys and polls. Here are two easy and free applications: http://polldaddy.com/ and http://www.surveymonkey.com/ to find out first-hand what your users are thinking. Include your polls on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and get quick results.
How often does Google crawl?
Posted in: Internet Marketing Buzz Words, Search Engine Optimization by Sol on November 12, 2009 | No Comments
Internet marketing success is almost completely based on the ability to maximize search engine optimization. You can do everything right in terms of website promotion, follow all the best and up to date SEO optimization strategies and provide users with original material and added value content. But there are millions of websites out there. Unless your site is a rare concept, it is probably one of many competing for the attention of search engines. I have always struggled with whether to look at search engine placement techniques as art, or science. (This would make an interesting discussion for a future blog post. Any input would be welcome).
After all your SEO groundwork is done, there is one last thing that needs to happen. The site has to wait to be crawled by search engines. The big question is how often does Google (and the other search engines) crawl? Is there a way to make it happen sooner or more frequently?
I decided to study this question in an old fashioned, yet scientific manner. Rather than just relying on checking my web stats, I decided to search for my site on Google using keyword terms I knew would be successful and checking the cached date presented (see the word “cached” under each result). I found the date and time of the last snapshot Google took of my site. I also repeated this for 10 other sites. I chose some of the largest, most popular sites on the web, with ever-changing content, some very small newer sites and a few medium sized sites.
I then repeated this survey every day at the same time of day. After a few days, I found out what I had suspected, and in fact, what we are told by Google, openly in their webmaster guidelines:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
The criteria by which Google crawls a site….. depends. I could not find the hard and fast rules, but page rank, the frequency of updating and refreshing content, the relevancy of content and other factors do play a decidedly crucial role. Some of the newer sites with static content seemed to get cached about every 12 or 13 days whereas some other sites seemed to be cached daily.
However, the real shocking revelation is something else I learned.
On the fourth day in a row of accessing this openly available information, after checking 8 sites, I was suddenly denied access to the last cache date result. Upon clicking on the “Cache” link, I received the message: “We’re sorry, but the computer or network you are using may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”
Checking Google crawl information too frequently? I received this Google Message.
I had to contact Google and explain that I was searching for this information for 11 sites only, without any use of software or any mechanism that would breach their terms of service.
Google was able to pick up on my pattern of searching for cache date information, and assumed that my searching was tantamount to automated queries. My first reaction was to take this a compliment to my efficient and quick searching skills. However, that feeling quickly disappeared when it dawned on me that I was being blocked from further accessing cache date information, based on an automated monitoring mechanism.
This experience was in fact a bigger lesson to me. It showed me the extent to which Google, and presumably other search engines, guard their criteria and procedures for their search engine spiders. Though on the one hand we know much information about search engine optimization, on the other hand we don’t even have some basic understanding of the topic. For example, does a high page rank tell the search engines to spider more often, or is a page that is spidered more often (due to other criteria) result in a higher page rank?
These uncertainties and the lack of full disclosure of search engine crawling or spidering is part of the genius of Google and others. It makes us, internet marketing professionals and aficionados, have to work harder, smarter and constantly. It ensures that the system is not manipulated. Providing a good user experience to a searcher is their business, and ultimately this is good for all of us.
It just means that we have to continue to use our genius to get great search engine placement in the name of ongoing website promotion.