Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Google Inside Search intro
Sometimes Google is just too clever, interpreting spelling mistakes, adding synonyms and based results on previous searches. Creating “a search in quotes” can help here, but sometimes you don’t want these additional features.
It’s now introduced “Verbatim” to turn off it’s main “user intention assumption” which you can access as with other Advanced Search features from the left (ex-Jazz) sidebar:
The announcement about the update is interesting for SEOs since it lists the normal improvements Google can make:.
making automatic spelling corrections personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before
including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])
finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding…
It's not simply a case of black hat or white hat
Ethics in SEO is, as in other cases, divided into two categories: the right way and the wrong way to do things. In SEO this shades from good (White Hat) to evil (Black hat) as explained in this classic article on Shades of SEO:
In SEO, the right way means following the guidelines set down as the “bible” of the Industry, the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines. Although all full time SEOs will know these and often discuss ethics, I’m summarising these since not all marketers are aware of them and it’s useful to know about them when discussing what is ethical and what isn’t with agencies - it’s a discussion all clients should have with their agencies, particularly when selecting them.
The Google Quality guidelines are designed to maximise the…
How BBC Worldwide grew traffic to the Good Food website 60% + in 12 months
I recently caught up with BBC Worldwide Digital Marketing Manager, Selina Holliday, to talk through what's involved with managing a popular online publication. I’d heard about their success across multiple BBC web properties including the Good Food website, so I wanted to quiz Selina to learn how she and the wider BBC Worldwide team managed to grow one of the sites in their portfolio as much as they did (BBC Good Food). Let’s recognise that this growth is quite an achievement for a website that already receives high volumes of traffic.
So what's the secret? My takeaway was "Keep it simple and focus limited resources on getting the basics right".…
Implications of the new Google update focussing on Fresh Content
Value/Importance: [rating=5]
Source: Official Google Blog
Our Commentary
This latest update from Google is aimed at promoting fresh content (where relevant). The example they use on their blog I think summarises the update perfectly:
If I search for [olympics], I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics (the only time my favorite sport, cricket, was played). Google Search uses a freshness algorithm, designed to give you the most up-to-date results, so even when I just type [olympics] without specifying 2012, I still find what I’m looking for.
Google has been working on indexing content as fast as possible since its release of the Caffeine update last year. The update has serious ramifications on search results, as mentioned on the Google Blog it will affect 35%…
21 practical ideas to improve your search rankings
Although everyone is looking, there are no silver bullets for SEO. For me, successful SEO is about consistently applying some well-known approaches. It's not rocket science, but it is hard graft using a range of techniques which different people in a company and their agencies need to work on together. I've written a lot in the past about "best practices" and on Smart Insights we have summarised the basics of SEO and also the latest SEO ranking factors with which many online marketers are aware of.
On their own, the ranking factors aren't so useful, context is needed to illustrate how they can be applied in practice through being creative, so I thought it would be interesting and different to create a series of posts looking at simple SEO approaches with examples. They're relevant for all companies from small to large, but…
Google Product Listing Ads are now live in UK, Germany and France
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Google Announcement & Key Questions Answered
Our commentary
The ability to display your products through the Google Merchant center is something most online retailers are now utilising. Google has recently launched the ability through the merchant center & Adwords for you to display your products as part of sponsored search on a Search Results Page. This means if people search for keywords related to your product you can have your product search result displayed on the right as shown in this live search from today:
It will display your product images, price, product name & your website URL. See an example on the right. The new ad-formats take up a large portion of the sponsored area and really standout on a results page! Google's initial description of the new…
How we built SEO into a launch campaign for a new service
In this post I’ll share the steps we went through to integrate SEO into a campaign to support the launch of a new product offering. I think the steps are common to many campaigns based around content marketing, so I hope you find it useful. Do let me know of other steps or approaches you think could work for this type of campaign.
The weather…arguably the nation’s favourite discussion topic and what I have been marketing through our digital channels.
A key requirement of the Met Office is to disseminate our outputs as widely as possible to ensure that the public can take action for impactful weather and climate outcomes through all channels the public interact with, in my case pre-dominantly through www.metoffice.gov.uk.
The Met Office operates in the highly competitive weather sector with a number of private sector competitors competing…
7 ways to optimise for strong product pages
This article touches on specific items for product pages, assuming basic on-page optimisation processes have been followed, we have covered these in my Smart Insights On-Page optimisation Guide if you're not familiar with these basics.
1 Check Products have Unique URLs
Ecommerce systems are complex, they have a lot to do and unfortunately are not usually designed with things like Unique product URL's in mind. An example of what I mean by this could be:
www.example.com/product-1.html = The primary shortest product URL you can visit to see the product
www.example.com/category-1/product-1.html = Navigating to the product page after viewing a category page
www.example.com.category-1/sub-category-1/product-1.html = Navigating through two categories before selecting the product
Each of the pages above are unique to Search Engines as the URL's are different. However, the content on each will be exactly the same. To ensure you are not display all these duplicate pages to Google…
Covering Basic SEO, Social and Mobile SEO
Value: [rating=4]
Source: Internet Advertising Bureau Guide for Retailers
Our commentary: Running online retail sites presents a whole raft of specific complexities for businesses, whether its systems, process or marketing related .
While only focusing on the marketing (specifically SEO, PPC & Social aspects of running a retail business) this guide from IAB is a very nice simple suite of tips & best practice guidance for running retail sites.
There is a fair bit missing from the guide in terms of what you can do with SEO for retail sites, but if a guide covered everything it would be enormous & not actionable. The simple, sector-specific approach from the iab is what makes this a useful piece of content. To give you a flavour, here a a couple of less obvious tips from the guide:
…
If you use Google Analytics, and your site gets any traffic from search engines, you will love the latest feature they've just added, which was announced on the Webmaster Tools Blog on 4th October.
Here are the stats you used to get when looking at a 'Search Engine Keywords' report:
keyword
number of visits
pages per visit
average time on site
% new visits
bounce rate
So, you could see that you had (say) 50,000 visits for the word 'laptops', but you were left asking questions like "so what?", "is that good, or bad?", and left looking at other tools to try and answer those questions.
So What's New?
Now, here is one of the new 'Search Engine Optimisation: Queries' reports:
I've highlighted the exciting bits there:
The red circles are new pieces of data they've added (from 'Webmaster Tools')
The pink arrows point to a single example of an instantly actionable piece of…
