We all love a freshly brewed coffee in the morning and Google answered our call with Google Caffeine promising 50 percent fresher results for web searches than their last index update. Now they have released another update called Google Fresh giving you search results that are recent and relevant. Google understands that no one likes stale coffee or search results – find out more about the index refresh.

What is Google Fresh?

With the new Google Fresh update, the Search Engine giant is aiming to serve up the newest, timely and most relevant results from the last week, day or even minute for a particular search term. All it is in essence is a date and time stamp on the results being served up on the Search Engine results pages (SERPS). This is a change to Google’s ranking algorithm that will affect roughly 35%* of searches. This includes:

• recent events or hot topics
• regularly recurring events
• frequent updates

So using Google’s example if you simply type in the search term ‘Olympics’, you will be served up results on next upcoming 2012 Olympics in London. To give another example, you could type in the name of a TV show like ‘Ellen DeGeneres Show’ and it would bring up the most recent results for the show. Building on the momentum from Caffeine, you will start to see more high-quality pages that might only be a few minutes old.

Here is a video from SEOmoz who hosts the web’s most vibrant SEO community explaining more about the Google Fresh algorithm update:

How will Google Fresh affect your Google SEO?

As aforementioned, Google has stated that this update will only impact 35%* of the searches so not everyone will be impacted by this algorithm change. If your industry is not affected by recency, then this change is less important. If your website sells concert tickets or publishes latest products’ reviews, then it is more relevant to you. Here are some ways you can leverage the Google Fresh algorithm change:

Use Proper Time-stamps in Your Content

Add a clear publication date to your articles ideally at the top of the article or within the content. As the ‘Google Fresh results’ start to be served up on the SERPS, you will notice that they are time-stamped. This is not only important for Google so they can identify the content for recency but it’s also extremely useful for readers who can see when the article was written and if it is still timely and up-to-date.

Adding new and original content to your site

It has always been important for websites to add new and original content but with the Google Fresh update this has increased in significance. The important things to remember is to date stamp your content, ensure it is optimised for Search Engines and frequently publish content but aim for quality over quantity. By adding an RSS feed (see below), this will broadcast your content quickly and immediately. Content ideas include the following:

• developing a company blog
• uploading media releases and company newsletters
• creating a news updates section to your site including industry news such as white papers and so forth
• uploading videos and images of company events
• adding a forum to your site.

Getting published in Google News

This will not apply to every site but if you are producing newsworthy content, it’s a good idea to submit this to be published in Google News which has strict news quality and technical guidelines. If you think your site has fulfilled the Google News format, you can submit your site for inclusion. Google News will not accept how-to articles, job postings, advice columns, or strictly informational content such as weather forecasts and stock data.

Creating a News Sitemap

Before creating a news sitemap, ensure that your site is included in Google News, if it’s not, you can contact Google to request inclusion. Your News Sitemap should contain only URLs for your articles published in the last two days. You’re encouraged to update your News Sitemap continually with fresh articles as soon as they are published. Google News crawls News Sitemaps as often as it crawls the rest of your site.

Adding an RSS feed

An RSS (Really Simple Syndication) document – sometimes called a feed, web feed, or channel includes full or summarised text, plus metadata such as publishing dates (time stamp) and authorship. If you haven’t incorporated an RSS feed on your blog, in light of the algorithm update, it’s a good idea to do it now and optimise your site. An RSS feed can be submitted to Google and/or automatically downloaded.

The underlying premise of algorithm changes is to increase the integrity of search for users and now relevancy and recency is important. These changes you make to your site will not only improve your Search Engine rankings but will also lead to increased useability for your visitors – a win win. Contact SEO Works if you would like any more information about the Google Fresh update and how we can improve the optimisation of your website.

* To clarify, when Google say this algorithm impacted 35% of searches, they mean at least one result on the page was affected, as opposed to when they have said noticeably impacted in the past, which means changes that are significant enough that an average user would notice. Using that same scale, this change noticeably impacts 6 – 10% of searches, depending on the language and domain you’re searching on.

]]> 0 http://www.seoworks.com.au/02-seo-videos/from-google-seo-is-not-spam/ http://www.seoworks.com.au/02-seo-videos/from-google-seo-is-not-spam/#comments Sun, 13 Nov 2011 22:27:26 +0000 admin_seowma http://www.seoworks.com.au/?p=6023 Matt Cutts, Google’s head of spam has stated publicity that SEO is not spam and ‘there are many valid ways of making the world a better place with SEO’ – find out more.

SEO is Not Spam – stated by Matt Cutts. Although we and other ethical professionals in the SEO have known this for many years, it has now been made ‘official’ by the Search Engine giant. SEO has long suffered a public relations problem due to a small number of companies acting unethically but the Google spokesperson has dispelled the misconception that SEO has no legitimacy or authenticity.

Google has long supported white hat SEO with the publication of their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, their Help Articles and Webmaster videos. White hat SEO is traffic built in a natural and organic way in accordance with Search Engines guidelines and vice versa, black hat SEO is when techniques are employed which are not within the specified procedures. This may result in a website being penalised or even banned.

In this 4-minute Webmaster video from Matt Cutts, he dismisses the comments that Search Engine Optimisation is spam, and touches on some of the basics of white hat or ethical SEO practices.

The Google expert says there are a lot of valid things that SEO experts do from deciding on the initial site technical infrastructure to optimising your site to get the most return on investment and getting ‘more bang for your buck’. The whole premise behind SEO is improving the search experience for users and SEO companies Matt Cutts says that Search Engines to find and index pages better. These white hat SEO practices include:

• Visibility – an SEO consultant can help you with making your pages visible or accessible to Search Engines so their robots can easily crawl over the site. This assists in indexing your pages as quickly as possible to be able to return these results to users and improve the integrity of search results.

• Keywords – SEO experts can point you in the right direction to use keywords you should be thinking about. You may use industry jargon to describe your product offerings but an SEO expert can help you drill down and put a shortlist of keywords together that people use to find products and services like yours.

• Useability – an SEO company can help make sure the design of the site is attractive to both users and for Search Engines. It’s an exercise in futility if your website has high visibility and low useability. All that will happen is that visitors will bounce off your site and move onto your competitor’s or another site that is easy to navigate.

• Site speed – an SEO company can help you improve your page speed. Not only does Google use site speed in their ranking algorithms but if you can make your site run faster, that can make it a much better experience for visitors. Not only does it equate to higher useability, a faster site also saves money on operating costs.

Now that we know that SEO is not spam, Matt Cutts still advises that you still have to be careful when choosing your SEO company to partner with you in your internet marketing campaigns. SEO Works is one of Australia’s leading SEO companies and we have built our business on a foundation of transparency and honesty. Contact us today and find out how we can enhance the optimisation of your site through white hat SEO.

Fast websites have benefits for both users and owners – not only does your website have improved useability; you also save money on operating costs. With page speed included as a signal in Google’s search ranking algorithms, it has even more relevance for Web SEO. We show you ways to put your website into gear and increase your site speed.

Why should I improve my page speed?

There are several reasons why you should improve your website’s loading time as part of your Web SEO strategy. Here are just a few:

• A fast loading site is an indicator of quality by Search Engines such as Google and provides users with a better experience and increased user satisfaction.
• A faster page speed reduces your bounce rate as Google research shows that visitors will spend less time on your website and click back to the search results if your website takes too long to load.
• A quicker site speed contributes to the overall quality of the Web especially for users with slow internet connections.
• An improved on site performance will contribute more to your bottom line – increasing revenue while driving down operating costs.

What factors affect page speed?

There are a lot of factors that affect site speed and these need to be addressed in your Web SEO plan. Yahoo! has released 35 best practices for making Web pages faster. Here are a few of the more important ones to focus on when optimising your site that can make or break your page speed.

• Optimise images – Large images may contribute to 90% of your site speed issues. Speak to your Web designer about creating Web-friendly images for your site with the correct resolution and format.
• Minimise redirects – Redirects are accomplished using the 301 and 302 status codes but redirects slow down the user’s experience and can be the cause of your website’s low speed.
• Reduce the number of files that are referenced – Have a single CSS file that handles everything or two smaller ones (eg one for normal browsers and one for mobile) and combine or reduce the number of files needed to display a Web page.
• Linking out to other media – This can also be a cause of a slow page speed. Try not to link out to other media (eg images not hosted on your website). The only exception may be videos as these files tend to be quite large and may take up unnecessary bandwidth.
• Remove unnecessary code from the header of the page – A lot of java script code can be combined into a single java script file.
• Use a slash (/) at the end of your links: If you put a ‘/’ after the end of your links, the server will immediately recognise it points to a directory. This won’t make a huge difference to your site speed but every microsecond counts.

Matt Cutts, the Principal Engineer at Google briefly explains in this Google Webmaster Help video how Google determines site speed.

What tools can I use?

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a Web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site that have been recommended by Search Engine giant Google. These tools are designed to optimise your website for greater speed and improve your Web SEO.

• Google Analytics – By making a change to a tracking code, you can enable a Page Speed report which measures the page load time (lag time) for a sample of pageviews on your website pages and evaluates your content, traffic sources, visitors and technology in relation to site speed.
• Page Speed – This is an open source Firefox/Firebug and Chrome add-on that evaluates the performance of Web pages and gives suggestions for improvement. It sorts out any possible site revisions in terms of high, medium and low priority. It is also available as a page speed online tool.
• YSlow – This is a free online tool provided by Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed based on Yahoo!’s best practices for improving page loading speeds which includes 35 tips. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug Web development tool.
• WebPagetest – This was originally developed for AOL for internal use and was open-sourced in 2008. Depending on your location, you can test your website across different browsers. This page speed test shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance and includes an optimisation checklist.
• Webmaster Tools – Google launched a tool called Site Performance in late 2009 to give Webmasters valuable information about the speed of their site and suggestions for making it faster. The tool allows you to track your site’s performance and how the suggested changes contribute to the speed of the site.

Let SEO Works get to the nuts and bolts of your site speed problem – evaluating your page loading problems is an important component of our SEO Packages. Contact us if you want our business experts to give your website a full service and learn how to optimise your website for greater page speed as part of your overall Web SEO strategy.

Video SEO tools like YouTube are no longer just a way of sharing video clips – it has become a Search Engine in its own right. More than 13 million hours of video was uploaded to YouTube in 2010 alone. In addition to traditional Search Engine Optimisation, SEO experts now need to also think about video optimisation and leverage videos to drive quality traffic to websites and capture new business. Here are 10 ways you can optimise your videos.

Hosting the video on your site

The decision on whether you want to host videos on your own website or upload them to third party sites will depend on your video SEO goals and whether you want to drive traffic directly to your website or obtain link juice through a third party site like YouTube. Keep in mind that if you syndicate your video to a site like Tube Mogul, this may compete with the rankings for the videos hosted on your site and cannibalise your VSEO efforts.

Video hosting on third party sites

Savvy SEO experts know that YouTube is not the only video community available to their clients. Not only are their dedicated video hosting websites available, videos can also be hosted on social media sites such as Facebook, sent to video syndication sites such as Tube Mogul and embedded in blogs to drive traffic to your website through video SEO and video marketing. Some of the main video hosting sites include:

• Dailymotion
• Metacafe
• Yahoo Video
• Bing Video
• Google Video
• Howcast
• Vimeo
• College Humour
• Hulu
• Spike TV
• and many other video marketing websites

Video link bait

You want to create videos that are interesting, compelling and add value for your viewers. Ideally, you want to use the video as link bait and encourage people to email it to their friends, embed the video on their blog, post it on their Facebook page or tweet about it via Twitter to drive traffic back to your website. As per classic SEO, ideally you only want quality, trustworthy and authoritative websites to be linking to your videos.

Video formats

As you may be hosting your video on several sites, it is best to create the video in as many formats as possible so you will not be limited by the sites you can host the video on. Even more importantly, your web site users can choose the format and quality best suited to their platform and internet connect speed. Popular video SEO formats for the internet include .FLY, .MP3, .MOV, .MPEG-4, .WMV and .AVI.

Video SEO titles and descriptions

As with Web pages, it is important to have a good keyword rich title but it also needs to be catchy to draw in viewers. With descriptions, include a link to your website at the very top of the description and use original content. This may not be a do follow link but you want people to click on the link once they have finished watching the video and visit your website. Keyword rich anchor text in descriptions carries a lot of weight.

Video tags

Some video hosting sites allow you to add tags for video optimisation. Tags play an important role in video SEO and help people to find your video but again standard SEO rules apply – no spamming or keyword stuffing. For example, if people are looking for videos about video marketing, your video might be tagged with the keywords ‘video marketing’, ‘VSEO’, ‘video optimisation’ and ‘Video Search Engine Optimisation’.

Filenames and URL

Use keywords in the filename of the video and the URL that you are hosting the video on to help Search Engines identify the content and index it appropriately for Web searches. As per standard SEO, the name has to reflect the actual content of the video. So for example, if the video is about a restaurant at a hotel, a good url name may be http://www.mysite.com.au/Sydney-restaurants-name-of-restaurant-video.mp4.

Video site maps

If you have decided to host your video on your own website for video optimisation purposes, it is important to create a video site map and submit it to Search Engines. Each Search Engine will have video site map guidelines for you to follow. As you would with images on your website, keep all your video files in one directory. This makes it easier for Search Engine spiders crawling over your site to find them and index them.

At the 2010 SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, leading video marketing bloggers ReelSEO met with Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer and Head of Google’s Web Spam Team and found out his thoughts on video site maps and video SEO.

Encouraging interaction and sharing

The whole nature of video hosting is to create a video community. The ultimate goal of video SEO and video marketing is for your video to reach the video hosting page and be the most viewed, recommended, discussed or popular video and go viral. Each video hosting site is different but here are tips on encouraging interactions, subscriptions, comments and sharing of your videos:

• Enable comments on your videos and respond to feedback in a timely manner.
• Comment on videos that are related to your industry and encourage them to provide feedback on your videos.
• Add friends and invite them to subscribe to your videos.
• Subscribe to other companies or people’s videos that are related to your industry.
• Encourage ratings and reviews of your videos by asking your clients, suppliers and friends to rate your video.
• Post your video as a response to someone else’s video: This is a great way to attract more views to your video.
• Include the embed code for easy video sharing.

Video analysis

An important component of video SEO is analysing your video statistics. If you are simply hosting videos on your website, this would be done through your Web analytics program such as Google Analytics to see many people are downloading or linking to your videos and other statistics. Hosting websites such as YouTube will usually have their own analytics program such as YouTube Insight to give you valuable data about your videos.

Decide firstly what your video  marketing goals are and this will become the foundation for your video marketing campaigns and how it fits into your overall Search Engine Optimisation strategy. We include video optimisation in all of our SEO Plans from SEO Starter Plans to SEO Maintenance Plans. Compare our SEO Packages or speak to our SEO experts about video SEO and how we can help grow your business.

Here is a rundown and quick best SEO toolbar reviews of two of our favourite toolbars; the SEO Toolbar from SEOMoz and SEO Toolbar from SEO Book. An SEO toolbar gives you important SEO resources at your fingertips to optimise your website and analyse your competitor’s websites. Features of popular SEO toolbars include easy access to keyword research tools, on page analysis tools, popular SEO forums and tools to check dofollow links and page rank.

SEO Toolbar from SEOmoz (previously known as the Mozbar)

The SEOmoz toolbar for Firefox was chosen as part of our best SEO toolbar reviews article because it is a free download and provides easy access to some of the most powerful SEO tools and data while you surf the Web. Features include:

SEOmoz tools and resources: easy access to SEOmoz tools such as Trifecta, Keyword Difficulty, Linkscape, and even Open Site Explorer.

Page Elements tab: on page SEO analysis including title tag, meta description and header tags.

Page Attributes tab: shows everything from meta robots and rel=”canonical” usage, to page load time, on–page link information and http status codes.

Link Data tab: provides quick access to Linkscape metrics and the latest version includes new metrics such as Page Authority & Domain Authority, SERP overlay with detailed link metrics.

SERP Overlay: this feature lets you evaluate the link profiles of all of the pages in a Search Engine result page.

No follow links: simple highlighting of no-followed links.

View a simple tutorial for the SEOmoz tool bar or read more about the toolbar on SEOmoz’ website.

SEO Toolbar from SEO Book

The SEO Toolbar from SEO Book was chosen as part of our best SEO toolbar reviews article because it gives you easy access to SEO resources and market research tools to analyse your competitor’s websites. It is a free download and is seamlessly integrated with your Firefox browser. Features include:

Link information: This gives you valuable information about how many external links are pointing to a particular domain. With this feature, you can also search directory listings (Yahoo, Dmoz and BOTW), page rank and site age.

Advanced information button: With this feature you can access background information and export data like:

• site links;
• page links;
• directory listings;
• traffic estimates;
• social media information from popular social bookmarking and social news sites.

With the Compare websites feature, you can do a competitive analysis of up to five websites. You can also quickly check nofollow links, the IP address of the website and see who runs the website. There are also links to competitive research tools amongst other things.

Rank checker: The popular SEO Book Firefox plugin has been built into the SEO toolbar for added convenience. This does exactly what it says and allows you to check your rankings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing search results.

SEO X-ray: One of the most useful tools is the SEO X-ray which puts a pop-over of all the meta data. This allows you to look at things like on page headings, internal links, external links, and gives you access to the keyword density analysis tool.

Keyword Research Tools: This tool allows you to create tabs with your favourite keyword research tools such as Google search based keyword tool, Adwords Keyword Tool, Wordtracker Free Keywords and so forth.

Built in Feed Reader: SEO is a dynamic industry so it’s important to keep abreast of changes in the industry. This feature is populated with a list of great SEO blogs and allows you to bookmark your favourite blogs.

View a simple tutorial for the SEO Toolbar (emailed to get embed code for video on their website) or read more about the toolbar on SEO Book’s website.

Contact us if you are thinking about taking your SEO activities a step further and we can discuss our competitive SEO Packages and SEO Services with you in more detail. Give yourself a marketing advantage and install an SEO toolbar so you can keep a close eye on your competitors as well as the optimisation of your own website. There are a lot of SEO toolbars available but we have found the SEO Toolbar from SEOMoz and SEO Toolbar from SEO Book to be the most user-friendly and useful in our best SEO toolbar reviews.

Scribe SEO LLC have recently announced the launch of Scribe SEO – a plugin for WordPress that holds your hand through the optimisation process for your content, giving you a score out of 100, in your dashboard, before you publish…

Scribe SEO is a new SEO product that is designed to make SEO copywriting and publishing simple. It runs a real time analysis of your page for things like a breakdown on keywords, suggestions for fine tuning your focus on keywords, a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) preview and an overall score.

So can you completely switch off and write on autopilot? Perhaps not but if you are outsourcing your content and want to give it the SEO once over before you hit the publish button this could be a plugin for you.

Scribe SEO was originally developed for the Thesis Theme for WordPress, however it also integrates well with the Hybrid theme, the Headway theme and the free All in One SEO plugin.

This SEO tool would be very handy for anyone who outsources their SEO copywriting. You could run this tool before you publish to optimise the content without comprising the creativity of your writer’s style, helping to preserve the natural and creative flow of your content.

The program gives you an analysis of what the Search Engines think your topic is all about and then advises of the changes you need to make to better reflect the language used by searchers. The remaining content elements can then be tweaked based on best SEO practices. These include:

• page title: keyword usage, keyword placement and word count
• description: keyword usage, keyword placement and word count
• body of the text: keyword usage, keyword placement and keyword density
• hyperlink: Scribe SEO tells you the number of hyperlinks and prominence

Want a quick preview? Find out more about Scribe SEO here:

There are some common sense rules that still need to be applied and the first one is this…don’t aim for a perfect score. Agonising over a perfect 100 points will turn your content into a robotic, boring piece that is likely to backfire and leave you with a newfound list of unsubscribed readers. Take the advice on board, make it fit where it keeps with the natural flow and make a compromise where it doesn’t in order to preserve the context and quality of your content.

Overall, is it worth the money? If you are pressed for time and have multiple posts, multiple blogs and you update your content regularly then yes, this is an innovative plugin that has much to offer. However, if you are already an SEO expert and you are familiar and conversant with SEO copywriting principles, keep your credit card in your pocket. Although plugins like Scribe SEO can be useful, nothing beats great, original content written by an SEO copywriter.

Download a free trial of Scribe SEO, find out more about the Scribe  SEO’s plans and prices or read about some other handy SEO plugins for WordPress to optimise your site and boost your website ranking in Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Contact us to find out about our SEO Packages and SEO Services including our professional SEO copywriting services.

So what’s the ‘buzz’ about Google buzz? Will ‘buzz’ become the new buzzword part of our daily vernacular like ‘tweet’ and ‘blogging’? Is Google Buzz the new ‘it’ social media networking tool or just much abuzz about nothing? And more importantly will Matt Cutts ever shave off that beard? We answer the important questions and some even about Google Buzz and how it can help your Google Search Engine Optimisation*.

What is Google Buzz?

Google Buzz is Google’s push into social media and integrates with your existing Gmail account. An autosuggest feature nominates people to follow who are already connected to your account. Buzz appears as an extra tab in your Gmail inbox and allows you to post content and share files from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader.

You can share updates, photos, videos, and more and post publicly via your Google profile or privately via your Gmail contacts and new features built into the Google Maps applications incorporate social interaction with Google Buzz.

Five features of Google Buzz include:

• Autosuggest lists – contacts you email frequently are highlighted as suggestions by Google Buzz that you can add to follow your status updates and share content.
• Public and private sharing – between family and friends or post publically with real-time updates on the Google Search Engine.
• Photo friendly - see thumbnails with each post, and browse full-screen photos from popular sites.
• Inbox integration – comments and updates are directly emailed to your Gmail account and you can respond directly from your account.
• Recommendations – Google Buzz adds content in your stream from your friend’s contacts and recommends content you may be interested in. You can nominate whether you are interested or not and Buzz will learn what you’re interested in by your feedback.
• Mobile phone interactivity – Google Buzz from your mobile phone and share your thoughts about nearby restaurants, tourist’s spots and local businesses. It is currently available for Android and iPhone, but Google is working on bringing it to other platforms.

Want a quick preview? Find out more about Google Buzz here:

How does Google Buzz for mobile work?

This is where it gets really interesting. With the incorporated Google Maps feature you can start a buzz about your location whether you’re in a busy restaurant, at a concert or hotel and start a rich conversation with your contacts. To start using Google Buzz for mobile go to http://www.buzz.google.com from the phone’s browser.

Key features of Google Buzz for mobile are as follows:

• Buzz from contacts- you can view Buzz from your friends as you do from your computer and interact with them while out and about around town.
• Tagging locations – you can use the suggested tag if it is correct or refine your location. This will allow your buzz to show up at that location tag for other users.
• ‘Nearby’ function – you can obtain the public buzz about your location including people outside your social networks and get reviews, comments and recommendations.
• Google Buzz layer feature – the Buzz layer can help you find hotspots at a glance on Google Maps and you post buzz directly from this screen.
• Voice Shortcut – the voice shortcut allows you to post buzz via spoken commands. Just say ‘post buzz,’ followed by whatever you’d like to post.

Want a quick preview? Find out more about Google Buzz for mobile here:

So how can Google Buzz help your Google SEO?

Now to the important stuff … what implications will Google Buzz have for your Google SEO and how will it help your Search Engine rankings? From our initial observations, this is the buzzdown on Google Buzz:

• Link building: You can use anchor text within your links and it is a dofollow link from Google at least for now. Remember that Google is indexing links that are publically posted so these links help build your link profile and Google SEO.
• Managing your online reputation: With the Google maps and mobile phone integration, users can use the ‘near me now’ function to find messages about restaurants, tourists spots and places of interest similar to Yelp or post using the ‘Buzz about this place’ function. Businesses in return can respond to these messages in real time and address their concerns and feedback.
• Google Local Centre Business Listing: It is yet to be confirmed whether public posts generated by Google Buzz about your business and indexed by Google’s Search Engine will affect your Google Local Business Centre Listing but we doubt Google will miss this opportunity to integrate the two.
• Real-time results: Your posts, tweets, images and so forth will likely to show up in real-time results and pages get indexed very quickly. This will encourage people to click to your website.
• Autosuggest network: The autosuggest option means your network will grow quickly. You can leverage Gmail to grow your social network more rapidly (compared with Twitter) since Google Buzz has a built-in viral feature by auto-suggesting contacts you can easily add to your follow list.

So is Google much abuzz about nothing or a progressive and important social networking tool? Post launch Gmail users thought the privacy concerns were a real buzz kill and Google has already responded to feedback replacing the automatic following of people you emailed or chatted to regularly on Gmail with an auto suggestion feature and made other changes. Google is a dynamic beast and it will be interesting to see if Google Buzz will make a loud roar or won’t actually generate much buzz at all.

Contact us to see how our Social Media Marketing Packages can help you with your social networking, enhancing your online brand, managing your online reputation and build an online community.

*Sometimes referred to as Search Engine Optimization

Recently Google has announced and launched several important changes to their user interface, search index and infrastructure.

These include the rollout of “personalisation” to ALL searchers (whether you are logged into a Google account or not), “real time search” to include instant social comments such as Twitter tweets, Google “social search” which will include reviews by your “friends” and a technical infrastructure update called Google “caffeine” due to be implemented after the Christmas/New Year break.

So is Google “caffeine” the caffeine hit that you need in the New Year? SEO Works spills the beans on the launch of the new search index from Google as well as explaining what all these changes (and more to come) mean to you, your website and your traffic. Find out more below…

This is good news…

The good news about the following major Google enhancements to the search results means that high quality, well-designed and well-built websites with rich, original content and a sound link profile will continue to perform even better…and these are the three criteria that form the core of our services to our clients.

We aren’t seeking to alarm you…all the Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu and many more) are continuously fine tuning their Search Engine results and how they are displayed…we just want you to be informed because these innovations by Google may well change the playing field, or at least move the goal posts…for one thing, we certainly know that ranking measures will become less of a benchmark…and as we have always said, great Search Engine Optimisation advice and consulting is about delivering quality traffic that converts into opportunities.

Please read on…we’ve deliberately kept the notes brief…and feel free to contact your SEO Works Business Analyst if you would like to know more…

Personalised search…

From this week on, when you search using Google, they believe that they will be able to better provide you with the most relevant results possible through what they are calling Google Personalised Search.

“Personalised search” uses your web searching and viewing history to deliver search results based on the things you’ve searched for on Google and the sites you’ve visited. Essentially this means that two people sitting next to each other and searching for the same keyword phrase are likely to see a different set of search results.

Previously, Google only offered “personalised search” for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What they are doing now is expanding “personalised search” so that they can provide it to signed-out users as well.

Here is a link to the announcement by Google:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html

This video provides a good overview:

What does this mean for you and your website?

More than likely, this will be a good thing. High quality sites with rich, original content will continue to do well and your traffic and especially conversion levels should improve. However, if you sell luxury watches but were in the past reaching people who were also searching for “cheap watches” then it’s likely you will start to appear less for cheap watches if the person has a history of visiting budget watch sites. On the upside, if the person searching has a history of visiting luxury shopping and luxury travel websites then you may well start turning up for more “luxury watches” searches for that kind of searcher.

Our call is…be patient…we see this as a “swings and roundabouts” feature that will be slowly rolled out and one that we will continue to adjust your SEO to over time as we normally do.

Real time search…

Google Real-time Search updates almost instantly with “stuff” that is happening around the web “right now” – for example, live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and new web pages now stream in on the actual result pages for your query.

For some time, it’s been clear that search has been moving to real-time, but until now, Google was seemingly falling behind Twitter, and even perhaps Bing (who inked its own search deals with Twitter and Facebook earlier this year).

This video provides a good overview:

And if you have 90 minutes to spare:

What does this mean for you and your website?

Now, with one sweeping stroke, Google has grabbed the lead in the real-time search space, and it appears that Facebook and Twitter have both conceded that they aren’t going to outbuild Google when it comes to search.

And it means that finally “social media” has become mainstream.

We have been anticipating “social media” becoming mainstream for a year or so and have been quietly preparing for this moment…and in January 2010 we will be launching Social Media Works [www.socialmediaworks.com] with access to dedicated research, social media packages and custom social media marketing programs to help you tap into this new medium .

Social search…

Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. Google Social Search helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle…your Facebook friends, people you follow or follow you on Twitter or other “social” media.

Once you have granted permission, you will start to see at the bottom of the search results such things as restaurant reviews made by your friends if you search for “best New York restaurant” or car reviews from your friends if you search for “new cars”.

All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is publicly available on the web… you could find it without Social Search if you really wanted to. What Google has done is provide that content in one single place to try to make your results more relevant.

This video provides a good overview:

You can discover more here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-google-social-search-i.html

What does this mean for you and your website?

In simple terms it means that reviews, recommendations and reports from “trusted” sources such as your friends and business acquaintances will become more readily available…and if you run a business, managing your online reputation will become much more important. Now, every former customer that provides feedback online and all those reviews  will carry the same value, whether from a gastronomy critic or someone who ate at your restaurant yesterday. With this change, personal reviews will now find their way to a broader audience.

Apart from you actively encouraging positive feedback, it is more important than ever to be effectively managing any poor commentaries or reviews – this is now of paramount importance…keeping track of online comments through alerts, managing your responses with a positive spin and using these as an opportunity to improve your service or product quality is about to become the norm rather than the exception.

Google “caffeine” update…

Google “caffeine” is the name given to Google’s next index update. Back in August Google announced that this update will be going live soon after the Christmas/New Year holidays.

Different to Google’s regular updates, our research has indicated that it will be an overhaul of the physical infrastructure and calculations that Google uses so as to speed up the Google system…and not necessarily not a major change to the Google ranking algorithms.

What is going to change?

Of course, Google hasn’t revealed the details of Google “caffeine”…they just don’t do that. However, the new index has been live on some test servers and some Google employees also talked about the change. Our research indicates that the following factors will play a larger role in Google’s next index update:

• Website speed: if you have a slow loading website, it may not rank as highly on Google.
• Broken links: if your website contains many broken links, this might have a negative impact of the position of your web pages in Google search results.
• Bad neighbourhoods: linking to known spammers and getting a lot of links from known spammers isn’t good for your rankings in Google’s current algorithm. The negative impact of a bad neighbourhood will be even worse with Google “caffeine”.
• The over-all quality of your website: Google’s new algorithm will take a closer look at the over-all quality of your website. It’s not enough to have one or two ranking factors in place, you will need all your little SEO ducks lined up

As always, your site needs to have good original content, a good website design with a clear navigation, good inbound links, a low bounce rate, etc…same as always but the level of scrutiny and quality expectations bar may be raised higher. Factors like the age of a website, its past history, authority etc. will still play a role however, the “weight” of the different algorithm factors that influence your rankings may shift.

Our advice?

Don’t be too concerned… we think a large part of the new structure is already live and has been live for some time now in preparation for Google Personalised Search which requires more “grunt” from the Google data centres. There may be some short term jumping around of the data but things should settle back quite quickly to delivering similar traffic levels and growth patterns as they always have.

Remember, you are not alone…

SEO Works has one of the largest and most experienced “organic” Search Engine Optimisation teams in Australia. Every week we review, discuss and test the latest trends, research and announcements by the search engines to ensure we are at the leading edge of SEO innovation.

Your website content and search engine visibility is in the safest of hands. Please feel free to contact your SEO Business Analyst to discuss these important updates and the implications in more detail.

So don’t panic…

Before you start reaching for the Panic Button, please remember that Google, Bing and Yahoo are continuously refining their Search Engine algorithms and that these particular changes, although significant, are aimed at improving the overall search experience.

The Search Engines want to deliver quality, original content that is highly relevant to the keyword phrases being searched for…which is exactly the content that SEO Works develops for your website.

The basic service is free, but if you’re a serious marketer you’ll want to upgrade to “Animoto for Business”. Several new features have been added for business users which make the program much more attractive. The best of these features are…

Add Text to Your Videos

It’s no longer necessary to create special graphics to brand your video. Simply click the text button and add your business and domain name wherever you want. Couldn’t be easier!

Add a CTA (Call To Action) Button

You can now add a button with your desired text and a link to your URL at the end of the video. Besides the Animoto video itself, the button is only included if you use the Post/Embed feature. This posts your video to popular social networks such as MySpace & Facebook.

If you want to post the video to your blog click the Embed tab, select Other Sites and copy the code. Then just paste the code where you want the video to appear. You can see a sample video below. This was created for our friends at Saga Central who sell Star Wars Games, Toys, Movie Characters etc.

Note: if you use the “Post to YouTube” feature the CTA button is not included, which you can see in this YouTube version of the Star Wars Games video. Neither is it included if you download the video and then upload it to other video sites such as Yahoo! Video, Google Video, Dailymotion etc.

To add the CTA to your video click the Features tab when you reach the “Finalise Your Video” section. This was a bit hard to find…we had to search the Animoto blog to find out how to do this.

Animoto is a great way to promote your site, add interest and generate links. Check it out…