A short time ago Google officially launched a change to their algorithm targeting websites that are cluttered with paid advertisements above the fold. According to Inside Search the Google update “looks at the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result”
Sites that have little quality content above the fold will be most affected by the change.

A bad user experience results from visiting a website and being presented with poor quality content, excessive advertisements making site navigation confusing and difficult, or requiring the user to scroll down the page in order to read the website content. This is something Google is trying to punish by introducing this algorithmic update. Moving forward these types of sites might not rank as highly.

The algorithm change does not affect sites that place ads above the fold to a normal degree. The change will affect sites where there is a small amount of visible content above the fold and/or relevant content is pushed down by ads.

Google asserts that websites that implement ads to a normal degree will not be affected by the change, with only around 1% of all searches impacted. But how do you determine a ‘normal degree’?

Google recommends using the Browser Size tool, along with other chrome based tools that demonstrate just how much on screen real estate is being occupied by advertisements.

Impact on SEO

On paper the new algorithm change could be viewed as a good thing, with less ads meaning more relevant quality content, right? But this raises a question about whether or not Ads can be considered irrelevant content.

What about Google themselves? A large proportion of Paid Search ads appear above the fold before the user has to scroll down to reach the natural listings. Using their own logic the Ads would appear further down SERP results.

Danny Sullivan has touched on whether Google’s own search results are top heavy in an interesting and informative blog post on Search Engine Land.

On the above image the yellow box washed out and blends into the white of the natural listings. Is this deceptive or misleading?

The response from Google regarding the algorithm change was that “this is a site-based algorithm that looks at all pages across an entire site in aggregate. Although it is possible to find a few searches on Google that trigger many ads, it is vastly more common to have no ads or few ads on a page.

This algorithm change is designed to demote sites that make it difficult for a user to get to the content and offer a bad user experience. Having an ad above the fold does not imply that you are affected by this change. It is excessive behavior that Google are working to avoid for users.”

Danny asked the question how Google knows what an ad is.

“Google have a variety of signals that algorithmically determine what type of ad or content appears above the fold. It is completely algorithmic in its detection. Google do not use a hard coded list of ad providers.”

Conclusion

This change is one of over 500 Google expect to roll out to search this year. From an SEO perspective the update is another facet in the equation which must be considered.

It is probably too early to consider completely revamping your paid advertisement strategy, but it is worth keeping it in the back of your mind and using common sense. Continuing to deliver relevant content and the best possible user experience is always the best practice recommendation for web users.

Content will always be king, long live the king.

It is one of Google’s most dramatic search updates; integrating personal/social search and website content all in its patented search algorithm. Introducing Search Plus Your World!

Rather than going through the list of its features (which you can find out by searching here) and discussing Google’s latest antitrust law breaches, let’s dive into the bigger scheme of Google’s intent with Search Plus Your World and its implications for SEO.

Who Knew Swimming with Sharks in Australia would be so awesome?

I’m sure a lot of people these days know that there are awesome things to do , if you search hard enough for it. Care to swim with the sharks in Australian waters?

However, it is more than likely people would only try something new & awesome (like swimming with sharks) through trusted recommendations from personal connections via word of mouth, rather than simply reading it online. Here’s how Search Plus Your World actually comes into the picture.

The Lead up to Search Plus Your World

Search Plus Your World is the missing piece of the social media puzzle that has brought together Google’s attempt in delivering a rich and useful “Google” content experience to search engine users, positioned for businesses. This is through organising content by named entities i.e. people, places in search results, rather than content only provided by website owners.

The past few years have also seen many product inclusions in Google’s SERP’s (with many failures) which have brought them to this point, including:

• Google Social Search.
• Google Rich Snippets.
• Google Buzz.
• Google Plus One Button.
• Google +.
• The Google Bar UI Change.

However to provide a clear distinction between personalised/social search & web content, other changes were required to “clean up” its SERP landscape.

• Google Panda Updates – lowering search engine rankings for websites with low-quality content.
• The introduction of schema.org – rich mark-up to provide more structured data to search engines.
• Expanded Site links – Most often for brand queries to provide even more relevant results for users
• Improving search filters for other Google verticals, particularly image & social results.
• Implementation of the authorship tag – To associate content with named entities.
• Query Encryption (SSL) on Google.com – To protect personalised search query data.
• A toggle to distinguish between personalised/social search and website results – Search Plus Your World (as below)

Search Plus Your World for SEO Impact

Basically, the use of Search Plus Your World will allow search users to find content based on:

• Google+ content from your circles.
• Related people and pages from Google+.
• Photos from you and your friends.
• Profiles in search.

So what does this change mean for businesses depending on Google for their website traffic?

All users signed in to their Google account will see the personalised results as the default. At the moment there are observations from SEO professionals i.e. John Doherty suggesting Google is hiding local listings for personalised results. Danny Sullivan also demonstrates no Adwords results, as they are currently being replaced by Google+ brand pages.

Raven Tools co founder & CPO Jon Henshaw provides a great summary of its impact.

“In theory, it will provide more relevant search results that have been pre-screened by trusted connections.
1. Your participation and GPA in G+ will influence some of the search results for other people.
2. Your participation will not affect the search results for the majority of people doing searches outside your network, with your GPA being the possible exception, assuming it has some impact on the algorithm.”

Overall, for the time being, the quality of personalised results has not made any significant contributions to Search Plus Your World. This is due to the lack of engagement by Google+ users and the adoption rate of the Google Authorship tag.

Search Plus Your World for SEO Recommendations

It is clear that Google+ reinforces Search Plus Your World. Since other social media channels i.e. Twitter and Facebook aren’t integrated in Google, this places an ever greater emphasis of playing by Google’s rules.

Here a few tips for businesses to get ahead of the game:

1. Treat your Google+ profile like a website – ensure it includes all relevant yet optimised information about you. Include links on your profile back to your website.
2. Create a Google + Brand page and become an active member to become influential in other users circles.
3. Include targeted keywords in all Google+ posts to increase the likelihood of it being found in search.
4. Treat +1’s like quality backlinks. Only link to content that is worth sharing with your personal connections. SEO managers should focus on gaining high quality links for a website, as this will influence the authority of a Google+ page.
5. If blogging is a part of your SEO strategy, it is important to implement the authorship tag by linking it to your Google+ profile. This will help your profile gain more authority on Google.

Final Thoughts on Search Plus Your World

Even though Google is trying to make this a central part of what they do, it is my opinion that they have brought this latest update too soon. Like other newly introduced products, i.e. Google Places, Google should have introduced it on the right hand side of the SERP’s. Over time and with more user feedback, it could have then placed it “in” the search results.

Group M have also commented on the development of Google Search Plus Your World in a recent press release.

Let us know your thoughts!

Time to Search + Your World in Google.

Mid-Q4 2011, YouTube announced that they replaced Insights with YouTube Analytics.
Some of the latest features’ include :

• Quick Overview: The new overview provides all of the information that YouTube think  you care about, while also enabling easy access to more detailed information.
• More Detailed Reports: More detailed statistics which hopefully can help you gather more precise understanding of your content & audiences.
• Audience Builders: Discover which videos are driving the most views and subscriptions.
• Audience Retention: This new report allows you to see how far viewers are watching through your video.

And they wrapped it up in a nice pretty infographic for us too:

There are many kinds of products to be bought on the Internet. The numbers of online stores to choose products from just keeps growing – sometimes you can buy a product from the e-commerce website of a local retailer, other times from an e-commerce website in a country on the other site of the world. The quantity of content online is so huge that it is easy to get frustrated and not know what online source you can trust. This is the landscape of the Internet which can be explained by two theories:

The Long Tail

The concept of the Long Tail is that while the majority of people search using the same queries (products, services, subjects, etc.), few people look for less popular/specific keywords. However, from a holistic perspective, the variety of keywords with low volume of searches is greater than the variety of generic search queries. The graph below illustrates this theory:

The Paradox of Choice

The Paradox of Choice reflects the idea that due to the many options available for purchases these days, we often become more anxious, because of the time we spend deciding what to buy, as well as frustrated when making a “wrong choice” – i.e. if we weren’t satisfied with a purchase, but it was the only brand existing, we would be angry with the providers of that product. On the other hand, if there were many brand options for a particular product, we would feel irritated with ourselves for not having made the best choice.

Internet users frequently use search engines to filter through to the results that are most relevant to them. This process is also a way to reduce the anxiety of finding specific product/service/content. That is why if you have a site and you want to be accessed by your potential users, you should do Internet Marketing.

PPC

Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is essential for branding and e-commerce because it allows you to create specific advertising messages to promote your website for the keywords that are important to you. In other words, if you want to promote your site, make your brand known or advertise a product/sale, PPC will give you total control for this. Moreover, due to the cost-per-click system, the traffic is guaranteed since you just have to pay for the accomplished click. A good PPC specialist will understand your product and manage your online campaign so that you will be noticed by the potential client that is helpless among so many results.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about your identity. Many times search engines don’t classify you as a relevant website for determined query because your website is not informing correctly who you are. SEO strategies are based on long term activities that will improve your visibility by spreading your brand all over the internet (link building) and also by making sure that search engines can read through your pages and understand that you should be prominently in the natural results.

SMM

Social Media Marketing can be explained by the word “relationship”. The internet became one of the main ways to express opinions about everything, including products and services. This kind of opinion can be considered more important for users than usual advertising as it comes from a third-party and tends to be seen as a more trusted source. Therefore, it is vital to understand what clients are talking about your brand in the social networks and encourage them to try your product/service and tell others the good experience they had.

Conclusion

A website is not only the business card of a company, but also the heart of a corporation as it contains many kinds of information to serve different stakeholders. That is why money should be allocated for Internet Marketing, because it grows the site’s visibility making the business pop up in front of the internet users eyes.

Can you believe that 2011 is over?! Can you believe I’ve been living in Australia for more than a year now?! Me neither. But alas, it’s the end of the year, people! That means best-of lists and future predictions. I prefer the predictions. They’re more fun. And when you’re wrong, nothing bad happens.

So, what’s going to happen next year?

AdNews says it’s the year of gamification, NFC (near field communication), mobile marketing and social television.

E-marketer says that music will continue to grow in the cloud, people will stop “checking in” to look cool and only use it to get a deal, and content will become more magnetic.

The Mayans say the world is going to end! Scary.

Here’s what I think:

Mobile will keep growing astronomically. Anyone under the age of 15 will be completely disgusted at the thought of a pay phone. There’s no turning back from being connected all the time. Phones will do more stuff, it’ll be cooler stuff (html 5!) and they’ll be permanently attached our hands (if they aren’t already).

Bing will get bigger. It can’t be a one-engine world forever in Australia. They’ve got ads planned for this year. They’re doing relatively well in the States with almost 15% market share. And, they have pretty pictures.

Android will continue to grow. If you still only have your App written for iPhones, get someone to make it for Android, now.

People will use social media for good. OK, this is about 50% hope and 50% prediction, but charities and organisations looking to do good in the world will figure out how to make social work for them in a big way.

Cloud computing will catch on for the masses. OK, people still might not recognise that what they’re using is cloud computing, but non-techies will be saving things on the cloud, utilising the cloud for music and photos and videos and life.

The companies who succeed the most this year will be the ones who create fun. Fun in their ads, in their engagement, in their workplace, just more fun! Companies are getting personalities, and people are buying from companies that they like. And working for companies that they like. And they like them because they’re fun!

I will receive the most epic birthday presents ever. It’s not until April, so you’ve got time.

People will feel like total losers when the world doesn’t end, but we’ll get a hefty population boom 9 months later. Yay for “we’re all gonna die” action!

Happy holidays, all. And we’ll see you in 2012!

This year marks Google’s 11th annual look back at the searches that compose the year’s Zeitgeist—the spirit of the time. With Zeitgeist, Google look at both the popular and the  fastest rising terms around the world.

If you want to get your geek on and compare terms across categories, countries or just throw yourself into data, go to Google’s 2011 Zeitgeist site.

The video below shows what captivated people this year:

What got me most were the poigniant images that Google used throughout this video, they certainly gave my heart strings a good old tug. The two sections that tipped me over the edge were images of 9/11 anniversary and images of the troops (arriving home, being remembered and a father’s grief).

On that note, a very special shout out to all the men and women serving over this Christmas and New Years. Thank you for all you do.

If you would to leave a message for our troops you can via the Defence Department (Messages to the Troops) or Telstra’s Messages of Support (which was started on Anzac day and is still going strong).

As with many things in life, the field of PPC also has the age-old debate of quality versus quantity. A lot of newcomers to the field have a tendency to include too many keywords within a campaign. People seem to think that the bigger their keyword list is, the more likely it is that they’ll get more conversions. The rational here being that if I get 2 conversions with 100 keywords, I must be able to get 200 conversions from 10,000 keywords, right?! Plus, it’s also really impressive to talk about your campaign with 8 MILLION keywords.

“Damn, he must know what he’s doing, he has so many keywords!”

What generally ends up happening is that people spend a lot more money but don’t actually make the campaign better. If you add keywords for the sake of adding keywords, you will most likely have a pretty low click-through rate and lower overall Quality Score. This drives up your costs per click meaning you end up paying way more than you should be. To make matters worse, people tend to put all of these extra keywords on broad match! This just drives up your impressions to heaps of traffic that has no interest in your website whatsoever.

So, when you’re adding new keywords or creating a new account I suggest you consider the following:

-          If you’re pulling the See Search Terms Report make sure your date range gives you enough data to work with.

-          How much traffic are you getting from this keyword? If you’re not getting more than 5 impressions in 6 months, it’s probably not worth adding.

-          Use the traffic estimator and keyword tool. The keyword tool can give you new ideas while the traffic estimator will help you decide whether the keyword is worth adding or not.

-          If you’re adding keywords from the Search Terms Report, make sure you add them as exact match, not broad. Use broad match as a tool to find new keywords, but use exact match to be your sniper-like tool for the real money makers.

Having a huge keyword list will make the account harder to manage and you’ll end up with 90% of the keywords just taking up space but never even seeing the light of an impression, all while you’re costing yourself more money per click on the good ones. Of course, if you add additional words and they’re working for you, by all means keep them! But there’s no need to have a huge list just to say you have a huge list.

It’s always better (and easier!) to start off small and build out the keyword list as time goes by instead of starting off with 100,000 keywords and then having to go through all of them to decide which are useless.

In PPC, quality will always trump quantity.

Weber Shandwick collaborated with Forbes Insights to put together an infographic on socialising your brand, which is below for you to check out.

“The reality is that internal strategy, planning, cohesiveness and comfort in the digital space must come first if brand sociability is to even come at all.”

Because they were a little hard to read – I broke out the 9 Drivers of World Class Brand Sociability for you below:

Would you agree? Are there any key drivers  that were missed?

Hands up who texts? Go on, don’t be shy!

If your hand isn’t waving in the air like you just don’t care, I’m going to be bold and ask someone to chuck water in your direction, cause buddy your pants are on fire!

I mean, even my mum is a text fiend – though recently I can barely understand half her texts now that she’s been schooled in text-speak by my younger Gen Y sister, luckily she still uses lol as lots of love which is delightfully cute and means I know it definitely mum.

Anyway, who doesn’t text all the time – it’s so easy and wholeheartedly lends itself to multi-tasking. Thinking back to my first mobile, text has evolved from the simple chatter or trying to lock in the next social engagement to be a lot more. I get appointment reminders via text from my hair-dresser, I the latest offers from one of the spas I go to via text and I get verification codes from uBank for any transactions I complete online via text. Overall pretty neat stuff.

What I liked about this infographic by MBA Online, is that it presents some of the more fascinating ways text is being used around the globe such as the verification of non-counterfeit pills in Ghana & Nigeria.

Take a look for yourself:

In a world which has seen Social Media infiltrate pretty much most aspects of our lives (hands up whose parents are on Facebook? I know my mum is), there are still some who feel Social media doesn’t have a place in business. They see it as a passing fad and one they’re hoping disappears sooner rather than later.

This is a little naïve, and we’re not the only ones who think so! At the basic level, companies have their own Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles and Twitter accounts. If you’re not “buying in” to Social media, you can be pretty certain your competitors are or will before long.

However, if you need even more proof that it’s here to stay, quite simply look around you!

People ‘check-in’ at work or even at their client meetings.

They’re next to you at events taking photos or videos on their iPhone (once upon a time, this used to be a sneaky affair, now people are pretty blatant about it), which they then post on Facebook, their blog. While they’re at it they’ll tweet to let you know all about what they think of the event too.

It’s the department heads scouring LinkedIn profiles of job applicants and potential candidates. This is something I do whenever we’re recruiting. I see who’s out there and check people out during the interview process.

Businesses can make Social media work for them in terms of client education and brand awareness to name just two opportunities available to them.

The Infographic I’m sharing with you today builds on my previous post on the Current State Of Social Media. It is also from One Lily Creative Agency and helps to illustrate the reach of Social Media: