2010 has been a busy year for search engines, and it is becoming more and more important for them to provide the most relevant results, as the search volumes has been regularly increasing year on year.

Each year, there have been an increasing number of searches, more searchers, and those searchers do more searches themselves, so one thing is for sure: ranking well for key search terms is more important than ever.

Let’s have a look at the top changes search engines brought in 2010, in order for them to provide more relevant results and drive searchers to their site:

#1 Google drinks too much coffee and brings out the “caffeine” update

What does that mean for results? Where Google used to index pages and sites in regular waves, this update allowed them to update their results incrementally, meaning quicker indexing. If you are working to get your site optimised,

you will see changes quicker, whether they are positive or negative.

This caused quite a stir in the SEO business as rankings changed, pages disappeared and came back, but it quickly stabilised. People following the big Google algorithm updates will know it usually does impact the results quite a bit but it is always an intense moment!

#2 What you say online becomes a ranking factor

Social media is growing at a fast pace, Twitter is going to hit the 200 million user mark early this year, Facebook has already over 500 million users and its founder already has a biography movie after only 20 years of his life. Impossible for search engines to miss out on the opportunity to surf the social media wave and use the huge amount of content being shared to display more accurate results, so they started in 2010!

Google started by crawling Twitter feeds and links, and provided a “Real time” search option which enables us to search for tweets on specific keywords. There was also a debate trying to determine whether links from Twitter provide some benefits to the pages they link to, and some recent findings would lead to believe that engaging in the Tweetosphere has to be on the 2011 agenda. Google also detects when people share links with friends on Facebook.

Bing on the other hand created a partnership with Facebook, in order for them to be able to use “likes” from users to affect rankings for pages using the Facebook “Like” button.

But this is only the beginning, and 2011 will reveal many more social media related algorithm updates.

#3 Slow typers discover the joys of Google Instant

Late 2010, Google added the “Instant” feature, which provides results as you type, without having to hit “enter” for the results to display.

For many, it is more of a gadget than anything else, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one having noticed high search volumes for keywords that aren’t complete… For example, if you use the Google Keyword Tool, you’ll notice some keyword suggestions are keywords that aren’t complete such as “car ins” or “seo consu”.

Where this simplifies search for the user, this also impacts websites focusing on some longer tail keywords, so I would recommend keeping an eye open to how this can affect your traffic.

#4 Local results take over

Firstly, Google (again) have made 2010 a year to tackle the challenge of local results. Most queries including a location keyword (city, suburb, postcode, country) now display local results.

After launching Google Places, for every local query, they displayed a map with pins between the sponsored results and the organic results. This apparently was not good enough so they changed the display in order for the local results to look more like organic results, with a map on the top right hand side.

This means owning your business on Google places is very important, as this can provide a valuable spot on the first page of Google, if done and optimised well.

Evidence shows that Google is investing heavily in local search (Marissa Meyer, VP Search, moved to Local, trying to buy Yelp) and wants to use maps in a more efficient manner. 2011 will see some interesting evolutions on that side, that’s for sure.

Secondly, where mobile search tends to blend in with mainstream search, it is still a great platform to provide bespoke local results for mobile. Google Places has been implemented on Android and can be used as a standalone app. More generally, apps developed on mobile platforms are using GPS location to display local results for businesses such as bars, restaurants, banks and more. This is where local online presence becomes key.

#5 Love is in the air between Yahoo and Bing

2010 was the year where they decided to merge their organic results in an attempt to compete against Google in a more efficient way. Bing had been increasing its market share but was mainly taking them from Yahoo so, when the merger took place, Google remained the big winner.

In Australia, Google still has 95% market share while Bing/Yahoo have 4.5%. The remainder is shared among small search engines such as Altavista and Ask. (source: statcounter.com, as of Oct 2010)

As an onside, this merger has affected Yahoo’s Site Explorer quite a bit and as a result it seems like link popularity and saturation have been fairly inconsistent these past few months. So hopefully early 2011 will see this great toll get back on track!

#6 How quick does your website load?

If you feel like your website takes a while to load when on a broadband connection, then it probably is getting penalised in rankings, compared to other quicker to load competing websites.

Google decided 2010 was the year to start applying the rationale “I want my users to find relevant sites which don’t take too long to load too avoid user frustration”. Based on opinions from SEOs all around the world, this has quickly become a key factor to website optimisation.

Using Yslow for example, you will be able to assess your website and get to learn about “minifying”, “css sprites”, “gzipping”, “http requests” and other ways of reducing the page loading time and have a website Google will want to put on top.

I actually think this is positive from a user’s perspective, it makes web browsing so much more comfortable, and it pushes web developers to clean up their code; thus improving the standards of the web.

#7 New guys on the block

2010 has seen the appearance or the discovery of some interesting new competitors to the big G (Google). Instead of replicating, these new search engines are actually innovating how to search for websites.

The first and probably most interesting one for SEO is Blekko, launched in 2010 with an interesting concept using slashtags which Rich Skrenta explains here:

“Slashtags let all of the vertical engines that people define on Blekko live within the same search box. They also let you do a search and quickly pivot from one vertical to another.”

So if you want to shop for the item you are searching, you would type “red dress /shop”.

The most interesting one which relates to social media: the Likes slashtag. Do you want to display results that your Facebook friends liked? Simply type “kitten videos /likes” !

Other search engines generating interest are Yandex in English (biggest SE in Russia) and DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo has actually been around for a few years now, but it’s only recently that it has been getting a bit more attention.

#8 Other Google related updates worth reminding

Ever tried converting measures or currencies using Google? Or getting simple questions answered directly without having to click into a website? That’s one of the 2010 added features from Google.

Search for “20 Australian dollars in us dollars” and you’ll get the converted currency below the search box. Search for “how high is the Eiffel tower” and again, you’ll get the answer below the search box (1,063 feet for those who are curious).

Another interesting SEO related discovery is the increased likelihood of getting your website crawled thoroughly if your brand comes up in the online reputable press (such as “The Australian”). It has been discovered that the Google bot will read about the brand in an article and would then go to the brands website and crawl it extensively. So get your PR teams working and you could just see your brand gain reputation online.

#9 Youtube Videos

Youtube is the second most popular social site after Facebook in Australia, and sees 35 hours’ worth of video uploaded every minute. To put this in perspective, Hunter Walk, Youtube’s Director of product management, explains: “If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week.”

2010 is yet the biggest year for Youtube in terms of popularity, meaning having an online presence using video has never been as important.

With its improved video optimisation options such as video transcripts, 2011 will be the year to jump on the band wagon, if you haven’t already, and get some videos uploaded and fully optimised in order to make sure you are found.

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?

What do social media and tattoos have in common? They’re both things you might live to regret!

At the end of 2009 the major search engines brokered deals with the larger social media players (i.e. Twitter), allowing them to index real time content and thus further embedding social information within search results.

Will consumers and businesses start trawling for information via the likes of Google and what will they come up with?

As we continue to live in the now, we tend to forget about the potential long term implications associated with Social Media. For example, a recent security flaw on Facebook highlighted that there is the potential to compromise private conversations.

Should consumer privacy concerns continue to mount; what are the implications to businesses? Will consumers tend to shy away from engaging with brands within Social Media platforms? How will consumer behaviour change?

An article published recently in the New York Times discussed how the concerned “Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline” are increasingly “self censoring” digital assets they post on social media networks. Concerns regarding potential career prospects were covered in the article; where photos of not so flattering or derogative comments may come back to haunt you one day. Will prospective employers use these forums to conduct character references? Other concerns related to identity theft and other privacy related matters are also discussed.

Research findings published in the New York Times article showed “In its telephone survey of 1,000 people, the Berkeley Centre for Law and Technology at the University of California found that 88 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds it surveyed last July said there should be a law that requires Web sites to delete stored information. And 62 percent said they wanted a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knows about them.”

Given this insight how will social media play out? Will it be the role of government to facilitate stringent privacy legislation or will it be left in the hands of the consumer?

What are your thoughts? Will this slow down uptake?

Google recently took their social offering one step further when they released Google Buzz, which integrates right into Gmail. It is similar to Twitter, but has more features and is more robust. Google have had limited success with social; Orkut, their own social networking site, only gained traction in Brazil and India and numerous other social tools such as Jaiku, Dodgeball, FriendConnect, OpenSocial and Latitude, haven’t had the impact Google would have liked.

Google Buzz aggregates data from Twitter, Picasa, Google Reader, YouTube, Flickr and even your Google chat status. Facebook is currently missing from this list, but Google have announced that it’s not completely out of the question. Google Buzz automatically follows the contacts you email and chat to most frequently and photos, videos and links can be integrated into each Buzz message. There appears to be no limit to the number of characters within each message, so you no longer have to shorten your updates, or resort to textspeak, to fit within the 140 character limit.

Google Buzz connects with Picasa Web Albums and photos can be added directly to a Buzz message, either uploaded from your computer or selected from one of your existing Picasa albums. All photos added to a Buzz message are stored in your Picasa account and count toward your storage limit. As photos are shown inline with your Buzz message there’s no need to follow a link to a 3rd party site to view photos as is the case with Twitter. Adding public photos to your Picasa account will create a new Buzz message displaying the recently added photos that can then be viewed using the inbuilt full-screen viewer.

Posts and replies on Twitter are separate entries, which makes it hard to follow a conversation. Google Buzz has solved this by allowing comments directly onto the original post, overcoming the need for a separate reply. Google have also added a “like” button to each post, which is very similar to the Facebook feature added in February 2009.

The mobile version of Google Buzz allows you to tag your Buzz message with your current location. You are able to select actual places, like bars and restaurants, not just an address or a lat/long location. It is also possible to read Buzz from other people in and around the same location as yourself to discover what’s happening around you. Google also have plans to roll out a standalone version of Buzz outside of Gmail.

Already, there have been privacy concerns regarding Google Buzz. When your first enter Buzz, it automatically follows the people your most frequently email and chat to and by default this list and the list of people who follow you, are made public, so anyone can see who you most frequently email and chat to. In response to this, Google have made changes to the setup procedure so that instead of auto-following the people you most frequently contacted, you are presented with a list that you can review and confirm before continuing. Also, the option not to show who you follow and who follows you on your profile has been made more prominent, but these lists are still displayed by default.

The uptake of Google Buzz has been surprising to say the least. On February 11^th, 2 days after launching Buzz, Google announced that “tens of millions of people have checked Buzz out, creating over 9 million posts and comments. Plus, we’re seeing over 200 posts per minute from mobile phones around the world.” This is amazing considering that it was rolled out slowly.

Overall, Google Buzz is great product, it has taken the successful Twitter model, updated and expanded it and incorporated it right into Gmail and onto mobile. I don’t believe Google Buzz will pull current users away from Twitter or Facebook just yet. It may, however, entice new users who haven’t yet joined Facebook or Twitter, into micro-blogging as they do not have to sign up for a new account, join another service or get used to a new and unfamiliar interface as they can start “Buzzing” from their current Gmail account.

With the hundreds, if not thousands, of blog posts that are written each hour, how can you ensure that yours is going to be relevant, topical and interesting?

The beauty of social media is that all the information you need, to come up with an idea for a post, is at your fingertips. With a bit of research it’s relatively easy to find trending topics in your industry and, if you’re quick enough, hopefully capitalise on some quality traffic as well as being helpful to the community as a whole.

Step 1: Choose a Social Network

There are many social networks out there, from the popular ones such as Facebook or Twitter, to the Niche sites such as Tip’d for the financial minded, or Dzone for the technical amongst us. It’s important to choose a network that suits your industry. I work in search and social media so my first port of call is going to be (insert groan here for over-talked about social network of the year) Twitter.

Step 2: Investigate Trending Topics

Twitter gives out their API  so there are a number of second party sites you can use to monitor trending topics, but to keep things simple I’m just going to use Twitter’s search site.

A quick look here and we see a list of last week’s trending topics (I’ve chosen last weeks as they give a better range of relevant topics to choose from. If there were no relevant topics you could look elsewhere for ideas):

Looking at these trending topics I’ll ask myself if there are any that relate to search that I can potentially write about?

There’s the obvious “Social Media” but that may be a bit broad. “Twilight” has nothing to do with search and I wasn’t a massive fan of the movie, so I think I’ll leave that one alone as well. A quick look into what the “Internet March” is reveals a competition called “Internet March Mahem e-Tournament”. It’s basically a tournament to find the ultimate web celebrity or site and people on Twitter can vote by posting the following Tweet with the name of whoever they’re voting for:

There’s potential there for a story, but I’ll just check if there’s anything else.

“#sesny” is a search conference happening in the States, so again there’s potential there. Following this hashtag could reveal some interesting topics or ideas and a post could stem from there. This could take time though, so that’s an idea that I’ll put on the back burner depending on how my morning pans out.

The only other topic on there that has potential that I can see is the “Fail Whale” – the dreaded whale that pops up on Twitter when it’s overcapacity. Given that Twitter is becoming increasingly popular at present, with conversations increasingly occurring around it on the TV and radio, there’s potential here for a post on how Twitter will handle the escalating usage of its service. What measures should Twitter put in place and the impact the increasing appearance of the Fail Whale could have on its climbing popularity. Possible heading – “Is Twitter Doomed to Become an Epic Fail (Whale)”.

Step 3: Research, Write and Post

From here you do any necessary research into the topic. There’s a lot of information on how Facebook and Twitter usage has increased around on the Internet which would be interesting to source, and it could also be tied into the talks that are occurring about Google allegedly trying to acquire Twitter.

This is just one avenue to determine trending topics and conversations and ensure your blog post is relevant and on topic. There are obviously hundreds of other social networks with handy tag clouds and trending topics lists, all of which can be used depending on your industry and who your audience is.

P.S.

The main factor to remember when writing the blog post is that it’s interesting and adds value to the reader. Ensure the topic you choose to write about is one that you enjoy yourself. There’s nothing more painful than reading an unenthusiastic and dry blog post that adds no value.

Follow me on Twitter: @kate_reuvers

The Outrider Sydney team were amongst the record number of visitors at this year’s ad:tech Sydney. Here’s what our team are saying about the ad:tech presentations that they attended.

The Relevance Of Twitter

Having been on Twitter for about six months prior to this but really not participating I was really glad to go to this session.

Relevance of Twitter session

Twitter certainly is becoming a powerful medium online in the United States but the panel of speakers including Mike Hickinbotham of Telstra expect that Twitter will become more and more used and useful here in Australia as a means of engaging with real people and real customers.

The list of Australian brands on Twitter just keeps growing, making it harder to write off Twitter as a fad and more of a force. Household name brand including the ABC, AFL, BigPond, Domino’s Pizza, Fairfax, Jetstar, NRMA, Rio Tinto, Virgin Blue, Vodaphone and even Westpac are on Twitter. Certainly, time will tell if Twitter grows in its revelance here in Australia.

For those who didn’t attend but wish they did, check out speaker Laurel Papworth’s coverage of the session on her blog where she kindly includes the slideshow used for her part of the presentation.

Data Portability – Definition & Business Benefits

The speakers at this session were Ross Dawson, Chairman of the Future Exploration Network, Phil Morle, co-founder of Pollenizer and Danny Housseas, Community Manager of The Data Portability Organisation.

Data portability means becoming part of the world-wide ecosystem of user data across the web. For example, portability would allow us to move user data to different applications, or places on the web, so it can be used in different ways (Think Facebook Connect, where you can bring your ‘friends’ network to new applications as metadata, and you can share information outside of Facebook, such as blog posts, restaurant reviews etc). If we were to consider the internet similar to a stand-alone desktop PC – with portable data, no downloading is necessary, as we can easily edit files or information online.

There is huge potential for data portability, as the internet moves more towards ‘openness’, all the data pools will begin to merge. One of the biggest challenges facing the area is privacy laws and security – who owns or controls the data? When you open a Hotmail account, who owns the account? You or Microsoft? There are many social and moral considerations involved in sharing data across the web.

The speakers were all very passionate on the industry, and will be at the forefront of the new world of ’social’ data sharing on the internet. Data portability has a fairly substantial potential impact on the world of social media, so the next few years will be interesting. I was particularly impressed with Ross Dawson who is a best selling author, with over 100 published articles, as well as being a keynote speaker and leading expert on the future of business.

Measuring Social Media

Unfortunately I was slightly disappointed at how the whole debate was prepared. All the speakers were exposing their own thoughts one by one without really agreeing in the end on how to measure properly social media. Thus it is not an exact science, I was still expecting something a bit more precise. I was hoping for a conclusion at the end of the session. Measuring your audience and popularity or success depends on each and every website.

A brand on Facebook might be looking at how many fans they have, how many people have interacted on their page by posting comments or notes whereas a brand on a video website such as Youtube would be looking at the number of views, number of times its videos have been set as favorites, how many subscribers they have, how many comments on their posted items, etc…

Even when you have exact figures about how your brand is performing on social media, it still does not tell you if you’re performing well or bad! For instance, 100,000 views might be an amazing performance for one brand but a very poor performance for another one.

In the end, measuring social media is still in its infancy but it is something that will hopefully become more and more clear in the short term.

Managing Brand Consistency Across Digital Channels

The speakers are well selected coming with different experieces, each had a different angle to look at the topic from
Was your session well attended?: The session was well attended although it could have been bit longer.
There were a lot of insights to learn, especially learning about the combination of different marketing media and how it significantly increases ‘Aided Brand Awareness’.

Digital media is however shown to be the most efficient medium for automotive marketing in the main case study – but this efficiency largely depends on other media use. So if you put all the media budgets to the digital only, it wouldn’t be as efficient.  Synergy is important.

Further to this, Michale Hauser from Tourism Victoria presented their experience in combining different marketing media as a case study which was quite insightful.