All posts in Search Engine Optimization

A question I’ve actually been asked quite a few times and although it’s easy to answer, there’s a little more to it than meets the eye.

Today, Google’s head of spam, Matt Cutts, discusses whether Google thinks SEO is spam. It’s a great video and worth having a watch if you’re interested in SEO.

Enjoy:

Please leave a comment if you’re interested in discussing this topic.

Google has announced that it’s taking privacy more seriously and as of today, users who are logged into their accounts and performing searchings, will no longer have their searches recorded by Google Analytics. In other words, when a logged in users performs a search and clicks on your website, Analytics will no longer tell you what keyword the person searched for. DAMN!

In Analytics, it will still report the visitor as an organic visit, it just won’t drill down to what keyword was searched for before the click was made because this apparently goes against new privacy terms that Google is working on.

SEOs will still be able to see conversion rates, segmentations and such, so not everything’s being removed, but this is definitely a huge smack for all SEOs and website owners who like to see what people are searching for to arrive at their websites.

Inside Analytics you will start to notice “(not provided)” instead of the keywords, allowing you to see that the visitor was a Google logged in users performing a search and organically clicking through to your website.

Interestingly, Google reports that CPC visitors will still be tracked, so that’s a little contradicting isn’t it? I doubt it’ll take long for them to block that too.

I’m not really sure what this is going to mean to SEOs, but what I can tell you is that it’s going to be a punch to the stomach of note and I can only hope that Google will think about this really carefully and if they don’t undo it (which I doubt they will), then they need to come up with something else.

The SEO industry were up in arms over this and Google’s taken quite a smashing today. I must admit, since Google launched its new Analytics with that SEO tab, I can’t help but think that this is some form of data ownership.

What do you think?

I read a fantastic post over at SEOmoz yesterday, the sort of post that is technical in terms of SEO, but not too technical that a lot of people would struggle to understand, so I wanted to write about the post here because I found it fascinating and I’m sure a lot of you will appreciate this.

So as a quick intro, what’s eye-tracking? Eye-tracking is the process of studying where people’s eyes go when they look through the results Google provides when a search is performed. What I mean by this is once a person’s performed a search on Google, we want to know where the average person looks.

As you can imagine, for SEO this is highly important and it’s an area that is often overlooked. The most important part is understanding that Google is changing – we see the Google 8 Pack, we see YouTube videos in the results, we even see products from time to time and what this has done is change the way SEO is actually used – being ranked in position 1 isn’t the be all and end all, it’s ranking on Page 1 with the correct type of listing that brings the traffic. It’ll make more sense after you’ve looked at the screens below.

This case study looks at 5 different key phrases and shows the results accordingly.

First up is a search for “best pizza in Chicago”:

Next let’s look at something more generic like “pizza”

Now let’s look at something which returns videos, “how to make a pizza”

Let’s look at an image results search, “pizza cutters”

Finally, let’s look at a specific place, “Pizza Hut”

Quite amazing to see these results, there’s so much to this! Deciding if video’s might be a good idea for your business, whether you should focus more on a local business listing or rather optimize purely for position 1.

The game’s changing and if we don’t follow closely, we’ll fall behind.