Today, Google unveiled their new search feature called Google Instant, which allows the search results to change in real-time, as you search. This innovative idea has sparked enthusiasm amongst US users as showcased in the video below:

Google announced that the purpose of Google Instant is to deliver users with faster, dynamic results and provide further predictive suggestion to guide users to find what they were really looking for.

Currently, Google Instant has started to roll out in certain countries with Google domains specific to the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia. There is however an additional restriction to users who would like to test this out – Google users will need to have the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8 in order for Google Instant Search to work.

Those Australian Google users who would like to get their hands on this feature can do so by signing into their Google account and installing Google Instant Search to their search results page. You can do this by going to the About Google Instant page and clicking on the “Try It Now” button.

I’ve been playing with the results this morning and it’s quite fascinating to see Google Instant results in action:

So if you have nothing searched in the SERPs, then you get a blank canvas. As you start searching away, the results and Google suggestion changes dynamically based on the words typed… for example:

From what can be seen at this stage, the results from both natural and paid search have not changed in terms of rankings, but it’s going to be quite interesting to uncover how Google Instant will impact the science of Search Engine Optimisation or Paid Search. Search Engine Land came out with an awesome article called Google Instant Search: The Complete User’s Guide, which talks about how Google Instant works and if they believe that Google Instant will impact rankings.

Matt Cutts also had his say on his thoughts of Google Instant Search, where he responds to the following question – “Will Google Instant change search engine optimization?:

“I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.”

Source: Matt Cutts Blog – Thoughts on Google Instant

Obviously, like anything that Google brings out there is initially a lot of hype and speculation, especially in the Search Marketing world; but only time will tell how Google Instant will truly impact the search engine results and how SEOers will have to change their ways of optimising websites.

Also another food for thought… does this mean that Google’s new product offering will further widen the gap between Google and the other search engines, such as Bing? Will “Instant Search” strength Google’s hold on users and on search advertisings?

Watch this space for more on Google Instant….

Update: If you’re trying to get Google Instant.. here’s a quick link you can use to get it working — http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy

We’ve been keeping tabs on infographics ever since the linkbuilding tactic came about in 2008, blogged on it a few times and its something we encourage clients to do.

So, after reading David Scoville’s post on SEO.com I decided it was time to share my research on infographics. Over the last few months I’ve compiled over 60 infographics, categorised them by topic, recorded the amount of external links they’ve earned and noted how many times it got retweeted. Is it a fad? I think not. Does it work? It can be an exceptionally good linkbuilding tactic … as you will see in the data we’ve put together.

Check out the free data sheet shared on Google Docs which might help you figure out if this is worth doing in your niche:

And here’s some top tips for publishing an infographic

• Create some textual commentary around the infographic to give it some context.
• Keep the publication of infographic hosted on one place for maximum seo benefit because you want people to link to your site. So, never use Tinypic, Imgur or Flickr to host the JPG because people will link to it there instead of your website.
• Host the infographic on a webpage or within a blog post. Give the infographic some context on the blog post and link to the full size image. Here’s a good example from Focus FYI: blog post to do give the context and the full size image for display purposes.
• Give people share + bookmark functions to easily Retweet, Buzz and stumble it.
• Encourage people to embed it on their blogs by having the code on the page so that it can earn as many links as possible.
• If you have a really long vertical infographic (like this one) then you can try to fit the blog post width format.
• Display the sources on the infographic to show where the data came from.
• Encourage engagement on your blog by prompting people for their comments.

What is the best infographic you’ve ever seen? Do you think this medium is a fad?

In previous posts I wrote about some potential changes for Google’s infrastructure which Matt Cutts called Caffeine. Now, Matt did say (I guess we are on a first name basis) that they were going to hold off on this update until after Christmas 2009. This was done because last time a big update occurred it was right before Christmas and it negatively affected online retail sales. So, a bit of love – just in case Caffeine would have a significant affect in the SERP’s.

Then there was a ranking change which introduced the idea of how web page speed is being factored into the ranking criteria. I will reiterate here – relevancy is still the key metric.

But, something significant happened in Q1-Q2 2010 and Webmasterworld, as has always been done in the past, called a new, noticed algorithm changed “Mayday”.

This appears to have affected a large number of webmasters with reported traffic drops ranging from a 10% to 90% loss with a very apparent change on how Google is handling long-tail phrases and how far more spammy sites seem to be appearing in some results. This thread on Webmasterworld is long with a lot of analysis and speculation resulting in 13 pages of posts, so I’d suggest going straight to page 13.

This has had a much more noticeable affect and is apparently not finished yet. As Google isn’t too forthcoming Mayday could be a part of Caffeine; however, this shouldn’t necessarily be so because Google stated that Caffeine would be purely an infrastructure change that most users would probably not notice.

One poster, dusky, summarises on May 12th:

“There are too many legitimate white hat sites being whacked to believe it’s a penalty. Many well established gov and edu sites, large commercial and corporate sites, well known news and media sites that seen a change for the worst so far for the last three months at least and starting MayDay in particular. G* sites themselves are affected as noted above and somewhere else, how many more days or weeks this is going to take is probably everyone’s question, at least the people who join my “total re-index” camp anyway, or shall I call it total-recall. We used to think they lost some or most of the data when this happened, and that’s why the crawl rate and the re-indexing, but it turned out it was due to infrastructure and algo updates, Florida and BigDaddy are best examples.”

We have a theory based on TF-IDF. Ian Lavelle, my colleague here at Outrider, took the time to show us how this algorithm change (and apparent surge in spam pages showing in search results) could affect the long-tail. You can read Ian’s post here.

UPDATE

I thought I’d update this post based on the fact that SearchEngineLand has posted a confirmation of the Mayday algorithm change on May 27, 2010 (see excerpt below):

“Google made between 350 and 550 changes in its organic search algorithms in 2009. This is one of the reasons I recommend that site owners not get too fixated on specific ranking factors. If you tie construction of your site to any one perceived algorithm signal, you’re at the mercy of Google’s constant tweaks……

……However, sometimes a Google algorithm change is substantial enough that even those who don’t spend a lot of time focusing on the algorithms notice it. That seems to be the case with what those discussing it at Webmaster World have named “Mayday”. Last week at Google I/O, I was on a panel with Googler Matt Cutts who said, when asked during Q&A,  ”this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.””

When Google announced its new “Real Time” Search results back in early December, there was a lot of talk around what this would mean to Google SERPs and how it will  impact organic search. In the usual Google fashion, the new enhancement created more speculation then answers.

What most people knew was that “real time” search results was an enhancement to Google Universal, where Google had teamed up with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca; and provided real time search results amongst it’s various other Universal search products. To get an idea of how this works, check out Search Engine Roundtable’s “Google Does Real Time Search: See It For Popeye” blog post; it clearly illustrates what Google’s SERPs look like with real time results.

Moving on from what we all know so far about Google Real Time Search, I wanted to discuss the next steps in Google’s evolution of real time search. What does Google count as current and relevant news; and how will the results be ranked naturally? I might actually have more questions than answers right now, but its food for thought?

Let’s look at what is considered “real time news”… Google states that “Our real-time search enables you to discover breaking news the moment it’s happening, even if it’s not the popular news of the day, and even if you didn’t know about it beforehand.”  So based on how Google explains the mechanism behind getting ‘real time’ news, the search results should be updated quite frequently on ‘hot topics’ that happen around the world.

For example,  playing around with searches around the Grammy Awards (which happened last week), Google SERPs bring up ’New Results’ at the top, ‘Latest Results for grammy awards’ (see) below) after the 3rd organic result, and ‘Video Results’ at the bottom of the page.

The “Latest results for grammy awards” section of the SERPs includes some interesting updates that reflect both positive and negative Twitter posts as well as latest press releases:

Considering the volume of posts on hot topics (such as the Grammy Awards), companies may have concerns their brand reputation could be tarnished by real time search in the blink of an eye. However, my perspective is that this only emphasizes the need for brands to embrace social media and engage with their consumers and their conversations, so that brand reputation can be managed more effectively. The main point of difference with Google’s Real Time Search results is that it centralises conversations from various social media platforms through one search platform.

Going back to the question about how Google manages to keep its real time search results relevant and only pick up on conversations that are worth displaying –one of Google’s guys, Amit Singhal, mentions that, similar to how Google adapted a page-ranking technology to retrieve relevant web pages in traditional web search, with tweets, the relevance of posts for real time search is built from the ‘reputed followers’. So put it in the words of Amit Singhal.

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely.”
Source: http://www.technologyreview.com

Essentially, I gather that the tweets are valued on how reputable the Tweeple is, based on their followers and followings. It sounds like a popularity vote, but Google goes on to state that its much like how they value link popularity and its not about quantity but more the quality of the followers and followings. On top of all this, Google’s social ranking algorithm uses other filters to ensure its real time search results are as “spam-free” as possible.

In short, the introduction of real-time search to Google was inevitable based on how fast social media is growing; and the way the results are displayed in the “Latest news” section of the SERPs is a reflection of the reputation of the social media user. This ultimately means that brands and individuals need to pay more attention to their customers and the online conversation in conjunction with any other online marketing pursuits, to ensure they really do “Own the Digital Shelf”.

There is a lot of talk in the traps about website page speed. Google (via Matt Cutts and Webmaster Tools) has openly stated that page speed will be a factor into the ranking algorithm for 2010 and will likely roll out with Caffeine – faster the better and you’ll be rewarded for it.

Google Webmaster tools have been reporting sample data from sites that have page speed issues (you can find this in the Labs section under Site Performance). Within Google Webmaster it also suggests the supplied Page Speed Firefox plug-in (installs as part of Firebug) should be used to get more accurate and full data. This has been available since July 2009 so I guess we have had plenty of notice. This is already in play for AdWords where page speed will affect your quality score.

This tools reports in the order of priorities – which things are slowing the pages the most and also gives a suggested size savings if recommendations are carried out and, I mean, recommendations. It tells you specifically what files are problematic, which images should be attended to, which JavaScript files can be combined, which CSS definitions (within an include file) aren’t being used and can be excluded, DNS look-ups, browser caching and more.

Google introduced this idea of page speed officially in their blog in June 2009.

Not surprisingly it has been written up on many sites. Webpronews covered this in November 2009.

The goal here is to make the internet faster and improve the user experience. In turn, it is very likely that this will also improve traffic and conversions. Here’s an excerpt:

“If you’re serious about wanting your site to perform better in search engines, and you haven’t given much thought to load times and such, it’s time to readjust your way of thinking.”

Of course there is going to be debate about this within the industry, with marketers and developers. It’s just a new little layer to make our jobs a little more challenging.

At this stage the Caffeine update has yet to roll out. The last update Matt Cutts posted can be found here: Expect Caffeine after the holidays.

Here are some other sites to read up on this:

Google Page Speed Report Comes to Webmaster Tools
Site Speed Google’s Next Ranking Factor
Google Wants the Web to Function like a Magazine
WebPerformance Best Practices
Should Web Page Speed Influence Google PageRank?

Over the past couple of weeks, while I’ve been researching Search related stats and Social Media information; I have come across some ultra-cool Infographics that explain the most complicated scenarios through the use of visual mediums – usually these are images and videos.

Hence, the cliche of “a picture speaks a thousand words” is definitely true in this case, especially in the world of Search and Social Media. So I decided to share some of these cool Infographics with you and to show how powerful they can be for SEO.

This was definitely at the top of my list for the best Infographics. The whole idea of simplifying an incredibly complex situation such as the credit crunch was illustrated incredibly well. Not only did this allow people to understand what really happened with the current credit crisis, but the use of pictures, and a well deployed Vimeo video, helped create a viral marketing spin on the whole thing. From an SEO perspective, the hub website, www.crisisofcredit.com, gained more than 18,500 links within 8 months and the Vimeo video gained 2.1 million views. In addition, iIf you also look at the SERPs for “the crisis of credit”, you’ll see that the 6 out of 10 results are all surrounding this original infographic, which is a great example of dominating the search engine results.

The next on my list of favourite infographics, is the image below.

This image metaphorically illustrates the complex world of social media that creates a busy city of communities, such as Youtube, Google, Digg and so forth. The original image was created by eBoy; but this image has been used by many other bloggers to visualise the essence of Social Media.

The third infographic which stood out of the crowd was the “If You Printed The Internet” image, as seen below. This is a simple, yet logical way to demonstrate the immense growth of the Internet. Looking at the blog post through the eyes of SEO, this innovative image is a creative way to gain links naturally. To prove its effectiveness, the image has over 175,000 links since the post was created.

Let’s move on to some more complex diagrams that have been successful from a linking building perspective. The next image on the list of cool infographics is Left vs Right World. It looks quite detailed and discusses the Left & Right parties of Government in regards to their regulations. I guess if we were to put this image into legal jargon, it would be near impossible for the general public to understand.. Beyond it’s intricate detail, this image alone has gained over 30,000 links over a span of 2 months. This just shows the effectiveness of link baiting strategies that use visual aids such as infographics.

The image below takes a more scientific visualisation of how people utilise their day with various activities. The great thing about this Flash image is that you can manipulate the different factors to see how the daily routine changes for different demographics. The New York Times also gained over 500 links for this post.

Well the next image is something that most people can relate to, coffee. Everyone likes their coffee made differently; hence there are so many types to choose from, such as Latte, Cappuccino, Flat White and Macchiato. Well the image below shows how some of these coffee types are made and how to articulate their names. It seemed appropriate to bring this image up, not only for its clever use of imagery, but also to show how a simple concept can generate so much interest. The blog post and infographic gained 408 comments over 2 months and 50,000 links to the whole blog site.

Finally, the last of the infographics that made my short list was the “Billion Dollar Gram”. The image is blatantly obvious; it’s trying to show how the economy spends, earns, gives and tightens its liquidity. I personally would say this is not the prettiest of infographics, but definitely gets the point across through one picture.

In conclusion, the above set of infographic examples are only some of many that I happened to come across. It appears more and more common for bloggers and social networks to use images and videos to explain either a simple or complex concept. Not only do these images seem a lot more pleasant to the eye, they also have a lot of traction to gain links and user generated feedback. This natural link building exercise plays an important role in SEO to help build relevant links back to the hub website and improve the visibility of the brand. This is something to then consider for a lot of brands.

Last Thursday, the 22nd of October 2009, Outrider participated as one of the speakers at Search Engine Bootcamp in Sydney, which was held at Cliftons Sydney.

For those who don’t know much about Search Engine Bootcamp; it’s a series of Search related conferences held across Australia and internationally to educate businesses, individuals and pretty much anyone who wants to know about SEO, Pay-Per-Click and more recently Social Media, such as Twitter. The founder of Search Strategies, Barry Smith, also runs annual Search Marketing Expos (SMX), with the next one coming up in April 2010.

Back to telling you a little bit about Bootcamp Sydney and some of the topics discuss throughout the afternoon:

Session #1: What is SEO and understanding the basics of what works and what doesn’t

This session was really to get the audience interested in the whole concept of Search Engine Optimisation. It started off with…

All in all, the first session was quite insightful to people who knew little of SEO.

Session #2: The three key pillars of SEO success – Keywords, Content & Linking

Now we move onto the second session which went into more details of the three core factors of SEO.

Session #3: Search Engine Site Clinic

To end the whole conference was the infamous Site Clinic done by Mike Motherwell from MMS Consulting. This has always been a great way to conclude Search Strategy conferences, where the audience can get some insightful SEO tips about their websites. Mike as usual made the final session as fun and to the point!

All in all, the conference was great to attend and a good way to get to know SEO on a 101 basis.

Over the last few days it was announced that Google will be making changes to its algorithm; a sizable modification which we may have not seen since the likes of Big Daddy and Jagger’s 1-3 in 2006.

Google has stated:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Some parts of this system aren’t completely finished yet, so we’d welcome feedback on any issues you see.”

Whilst Matt Cutts claims that most of the change will be on infrastructure, we may see some changes in the search results.

It is certainly an unexpected move from Google, which generally does not give the general public this type of insight, let alone coining a term for it before anyone else does. If you want to see a preview of this work in progress you can here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com

As for searches you will see a reordering of results, however, the change is purported to make searching faster and more accurate – more real-time. As usual Google is not revealing what exactly has been altered. Google have opted to make this change in beta for users to test, calling it a developer’s preview.

Users, as you would imagine, have already begun testing. Mashable has done this and published their results:

- Results did return faster and in some cases doubling the speed at which results are returned
- It does seem that some elements of blended search are further down in the page which could mean that not all elements have been implemented in Caffeine. Mashable even speculate that user activity on some sites may have pushed them higher in the results
- The new results do seem more relevant in some cases and it appears that it could be tightly tied with keywords
- Index size is also increased

In my testing I found that indeed the changes to the pages are not hugely significant. Doing a vanity search the first thing I noticed was that social media sites were more prominent. This may tie in with the result above that user activity may play a role in rankings.

So, what does this mean for SEO?

At the moment it simply means that we must be ready when this change rolls out. Will results have a heavier focus on keywords and user activity? If all elements of blended search are included in Caffeine then it would appear that universal results are being pushed down.

Obviously, as Google has put this out for testing, the end results will likely be very different than the current speculation of changes we are seeing at present.

As Tom Krazit stated on CNET:

“That’s not necessarily indicative of how the results would be presented, once Caffeine goes live, but it is evidence that the update will require those dependent on Google to drive traffic to their sites to study the changes. For now, Google is not sharing many details regarding how it reworked its back-end architecture and indexing process with Caffeine.”

It is still early days – so watch this space.

Further references can be found here:
Google’s New Search Index
Google Caffeine Tests

The internet is coming down with video content. To give you some idea of the scale, in January 2009 YouTube alone had six billion videos viewed.

Of those six billions views you might have already seen the home grown videos such as the “Charlie bit my finger” 109 million views, “Battle at Kruger” 45 million views, “David After Dentist” 25 million views , “Star Wars Kid” 13.5 million views, “Beached as” nearly 5 millions views. And, who could forget the entertaining Sparta the Mean Kitty who’s video has been viewed 25 million views and counting.

Now of course, there is another breed of video content, the sort that originates from advertising agencies and corporate offices and has defined commercial intent. Brands are increasingly using it for marketing brand messages, promoting services, educating consumers and establishing a presence online oftentimes entertaining their consumers (and potential consumers).

But can there be some SEO payoff for a brand entering social media with video? Can a brand publish a video online, get the desired exposure and improve performance in organic search? The answer is yes and here are some other recent examples of videos that have truly gone ‘viral’ and done well for the brand behind it:

Dove Evolution of Beauty

One of the most notable videos to come from any brand was Dove’s Evolution video which was part of a campaign by Dove in 2006. By striking a chord with female viewers the video showed how model’s beauty is often artificial but with a little Photoshop magic, Dove turned an ordinary women into an airbrushed beauty. Dove’s angle is an honest approach to beauty and has been rewarded with well over 9 million views, 9,219 ratings and 4,241 comments. What’s more, the original video has spawned 100’s of clones, remakes, and parodies. And what about the SEO payoff? The video page on YouTube has 8,823 links. Unfortunately, those links benefit YouTube and not Dove’s websites.

Evian Skating Babies

No doubt Evian saw the huge amount of views that baby videos were getting, such as “this laughing baby” and “Charlie bit my finger” and then realised that there was an opportunity produce something creative. So far, Evian’s Skating Babies original video has had over 8 million views. The website promoted on the video Evian Live Young has a growing portfolio of precious links.

The Crisis of Credit Visualization

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Jonathan Jarvis made an impressive video making simple the complex story of the US credit crisis for his thesis work for the Media Design Program. Over the span of 5 months the video has got 1.9 million views on Vimeo and another 1 million views on YouTube. What’s more, the main Crisis Of Credit website, has amassed a powerful portfolio of 21,000+ links.

Compare the Meerkat

What have meerkats and car insurance got in common? Nothing in particular. However, that didn’t stop one UK-based car insurance comparison site from making a connection. Launched at the beginning of this year, the videos play on the similarity between the name of the website “Compare the Market” and the Russian pronunciation of the name by loveable meerkat, Aleksandr Orlov. How successful was it? There are five original videos on YouTube now with combined views of 257,000+. The Compare the Meerkat website was nominated for a webby and has amassed over 11,000 links meanwhile the main website now has close to 40k links. On the social front, Compare the Market now have a powerful brand mascot if the 491,866 of Aleksandr’s Facebook fans are anything to go by then.

Computer Tan

Computer Tan was launched back in February to appeal to sun-starved Brits who want to “look great in the office” by using new desktop tanning technology. Ridiculous as it sounds, quite a few pale poms were fooled momentarily because of course the website & iPhone app is an elaborate hoax, a hoax with a serious message about the dangers of skin cancer. The charity behind the campaign, Karen Clifford Skin Cancer Charity Skcin, skillfully combined humour, hoax and skin cancer with video to score over 1 million visitors , 125,000 YouTube views. Breit Bart’s story about it was popular on Digg with 1720 diggs. And the SEO payoff? Thousands of links to ComputerTan.com and Skcin.org from blogs and authority websites including BBC.co.uk and Telegraph.co.uk.

Managers do well to consider worst case scenarios and SEO consultants dread the consequences. Of all the damaging things that can happen, here are 10 of the worst things that can happen to your website, all of which are coming from a search point of view.  Some of these scenarios are completely self-inflicted and therefore totally avoidable. The other scenarios leave your website mostly at the mercy of outsiders.

#1 Exclude The Search Engines!

The humble robots.txt file is such a simple little file and it is so often ignored. Its an effective and easy to implement file that can be used to stop bad bots from crawling a site. It is also used for disallowing the good ‘bots’ from spidering folders and files that you don’t want to have in the SERP’s, such as sensitive documents or the cgi-bin.  However, be careful not to exclude to Googlebot, Yahoo! Slurp or Live’s MSNbot.  How easy would this be? The following two lines of code is all it takes to tell Google, “Thanks for visiting but do not come into this website or include any pages into your index“:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

#2 Exclude The Search Engines (Take Two)

Similar to the first point, by adding a “Meta NoIndex” to the header of a webpage will signal the search engines to not index that page.  If a page is not indexed, it cannot rank for any keywords.  If it does not rank in the search engines then it won’t receive any search traffic. This has happened to a number websites where a “Meta NoIndex” has mistakenly been applied to important pages and its one mistake to avoid, especially when websites are coming out of the development stage.

#3 Website Spidered During Redesign

Most web designers implement redesigns by working on a staging server first before launching the new website in the launch phase. Other web designers have been known to implement major ‘dev’ changes live on site.  Needless to say, it could be slightly embarassing and somewhat of a SEO setback to either have a half-finished website spidered during a redesign or have the entire staging server spidered and included into the search engine ranking pages.

#4 Website Suffers Hacker Attack

There are several reasons why hackers attack websites, the first of which is pure vandalism by leaving a malicious message on the site. The second reason has to do with money, in the case of ecommerce websites hackers will want to get access to your website in order to steal your revenue.  A third reason is to install some form of badware on your site, software that when downloaded by the visitor, will fundamentally disregard their choice regarding their computer will be used. The fourth reason is to drain your website’s search engine equity by planting links to dodgy sites on your website.

Furthermore, if a website is comprised by hackers and it goes unoticed, the search engines could crawl the website while in the interim period and place a “This site may harm your computer” warning message in the SERPs.  If this occurs rankings and traffic will plunge dramatically and it can take weeks for the traffic to recover after the problem has been fixed and a reinclusion request is made.

#5 Hosting Outages

Asides from visitors not being able to access your website when its down (and all the associated losses in traffic and revenue), have you considered the implications for your SEO and SEM campaigns? From the SEO point of view, search engines won’t be able to spider your latest content and may even penalise websites if their bots try to visit when it’s experiencing server problems.  In terms of SEM, any paid search campaign will be referring traffic to a landing page that is down. This is obviously a waste in paid search budget as well as it negatively effecting the CPC and quality score.

#6 Target Vanity Keywords

Sometimes in our quest for more traffic we go after keywords that we think will bring in hoardes of visitors to a website when in actual fact, nobody really searches for those keywords. Similarily, sometimes websites neglect to pursue keywords that are known to convert better. Hence, there is an importance of solid keyword research to not only find out what people are searching for but what words they use in that search. Not only is this true in organic search, but also paid search campaigns where budgets get depleted by paying for keywords which have no relevance to the target website.

#7 Domain Squatting

Think of domain names as Internet real estate. Would you allow people or companies to own your main marketing slogans or brand terms? And for the price of a decent bottle of wine you can put your brand name (CCTLD) beyond the reach of domain squatters.

#8 Duplicate Content

Sometimes website content can get duplicated on a website unintentionally. Duplicate content is defined as multiple webpages that largely have identical content.  For example, an ecommerce store might offer visitors printer-only versions of product pages across a whole catalogue of products. In so doing, a website with 5,000 products could easily become a 10,000 page website with 1000’s of identicals. For SEO, this means that the overall ability of the website to rank well for keywords and phrases is greatly impeded. To use an illustration, by bloating a website with duplicate content its like driving a tank instead of a high performance car!

#9 Website Cloaking

Showing users one website/page meanwhile presenting the search engines completely different content is defined as ‘cloaking’. The term is probably derived from the Klingons in Star Trek and historically has been a ‘black hat’ tactic used to effectively deceive the search engines into ranking a website much better than it otherwise would.  Less sophicated versions of cloaking involve using white text hidden against a white background or positioning content off screen where it cannot be seen by a visitor. Interestingly, more than a few brands have had their fingers burned by trying to ‘game’ Google using this tactic.

#10 Ignore SEO Basics

Forget about cloaking and hacking, by far the most common thing that impairs a website from ranking well is simply to ignore SEO best practice. By ignoring the implementation of metadata, website archecture, properly coded HTML and link building a website will struggle to achieve the visibility and search engine rankings it would otherwise reach.