All posts in Search Engine Optimization

A little SEO trick for Google+

by Chris M on July 6, 2011 in Networking, Search Engine Optimization with 6 Comments

Something that I’ve seen a few people talking about this morning is the inability to create a vanity URL for your Google+ account. By vanity URL, I mean something like plus.google.com/chrism, instead, the URL is a jumble of numbers, so mine’s https://plus.google.com/112799292682719313212 – This is obviously a nightmare for telling people and isn’t SEO friendly at all. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the others do it, so now I want it for Google+ too.

There’s a solution and I’m keen to share it with all of you. A new service called gplus.to has been launched and it’s premise is to give you a vanity URL for you Google+ account and it’s really easy to setup.

Firstly, visit gplus.to, type in your nickname, type in your Google+ ID (this is the jumble of numbers I mentioned earlier and you can get it by visiting plus.google.com and clicking on your name). I’ve included a little screenshot of what it looked like when I set it up:

As you can see, the link to my Google+ account is now just <a href=”http://gplus.to/christophermills” target=”_blank”>http://gplus.to/christophermills</a>, which is FAR better than https://plus.google.com/112799292682719313212. Naturally, from an SEO point of view, it’s far easier for search engines to read. Please note: I have only just updated this myself, so I’m not too certain how the indexing will work, but Google would be silly not to favour all their users accounts over that of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, About.me, etc.

Google: what do you love?

by Chris M on July 4, 2011 in Internet, Search Engine Optimization with 4 Comments

A new toy from Google is a web service called ‘What do you love?’. The premise behind what do you love is to give users the ability to find interesting content across all the Google Apps in one place.

The website is in typical Google fashion, it’s a blank page with the following graphic, gota love their simplicity:

Continue reading →

Google rolls out new Page Rank update

by Chris M on June 29, 2011 in Search Engine Optimization with 3 Comments

As of this morning, Google has rolled out a Page Rank update, this is the first update since December 2010 from what I understand, so I’d imagine we can expect some big changes due to the recent Panda updates.

As the months go by, Google goes deeper and deeper into weeding out the rubbish in the quest to produce high quality search results, so if you’re not taking the time to write good content or you’re copying and pasting content from sources, you’re going to see your website slide.

Now, I’ve said many times that I don’t believe Page Rank means much, but the fact that Google has rolled out an update at least lets us know that Google does still care about it.

iMod’s sitting at PR4 still and has been since as long as I remember :)

How’s your website doing?

SEO: Rank as your competitor

by Chris M on June 29, 2011 in Business, Search Engine Optimization with 7 Comments

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), there are just so many factors to take into account, that it’s impossible to get them all right unless you’re a professional. Hiring a professional can give you an edge and I’m going to tell you a little secret I’ve explored recently which has proved hugely successful and it’s only something someone who practices SEO would come up with. Well, a few might, but not your average person who runs a company and doesn’t have time to spend hours reading about SEO, let alone understanding it and coming up with strategies.

Very industry has competitors and as much as people get annoyed with competitors, they also do offer value to the industry you operate on, so don’t always fear or hate them, let’s rather look at an interesting way of using them..

Hundreds of thousands of searches are performed daily on Google for brand names. There are many cases where you are looking for a product or service and the chances are you might know one or two companies that could provide these products and services, so you head on over to Google and perform a search for the companies name. This will no doubt return a www.companynamesearchedfor.com domain and that would be your first point of action. But remember, there are going to be many results on the page, not just the one, so there’s a gap to do something clever here.

Imagine you create several pages on your website, each of which mentions a competitor and has detailed write up on them, perhaps something like this:

www.yourname.com/competitors/company1
www.yourname.com/competitors/company2
www.yourname.com/competitors/company3

In other words, you’ve actually created pages on your website for your competitors. The secret here is to get your meta data right, for example, on the www.yourname.com/competitors/company1 page you could do a title like this:

REVIEW: Is company1 a good company?

If you do this, optimize the page and build some links to it, there’s a good chance your page might rank on page 1 for your competitors name. Doing this and having “REVIEW” in the title would make the indexed page stand out and you might find visitors searching for company1 in Google and landing up at your website on the www.yourname.com/competitors/company1 page.

Sure, talking about competitors gives a potential customer a choice, but remember, they were Googling for your competitor in the first place, you’ve just managed to “steal” them away for a moment. If you write a really good review about your competitor and create internal links, there’s a good chance the visitor to the site might click a link and start exploring your page, this could result in a new customer! If the visitors heads off again and goes to the company1′s website, that’s not the end of the world, because he/she wasn’t planning on coming anyway.

Ok, so there is a catch, obviously if you have these pages, the best way is to link to them from your Home Page, which means someone who actually wants to be on your site, might see the competitor reviews and then vanish. Of course, that’s a risk, the secret is to write the copy for the competitor review incredibly well, in the sense that you make it clear to visitors that your service is better – if it is better of course! And if it isn’t, well, then you better start making a plan!

I’ve tested this strategy out and it’s performed rather well. From my testing I’ve seen more people coming from Google searches for my competitors and then completing a task on my site, than people arriving at my site and leaving to a competitors.

It’s an interesting thought piece for you to think about. Let me know if this is something you’d try?

Who are you connected to on social search?

by Chris M on June 22, 2011 in Internet, Search Engine Optimization with No comments

I’ve been looking and looking for various ways to determine who I’m connected to in order to see why I am seeing their results in Google Searches, and more so, how I can remove certain people. Why remove certain people? Well, some of my connections are merely friends, the content they’ve shared might not be the content I’m looking for in certain niches. For example, John’s a mate who surfs for a living, he knows very little about technology, but when searching for something, an article shared by him shows up. This article was shared by him purely because his mate wrote it and in all fairness, it’s not a very good article. This is typical behavior by John and I’d prefer not to see his shares. Fair? Another example would be seeing tweets in search results from friends that are tweeting links that aren’t of authority, I’d rather not see those either, as I trust organic results more than social results at this point of time – my opinion, of course, will more than likely change as Google’s algorithms start indexing more relevant content.

Anyway, I’ve looked high and low, and FINALLY I’ve found something really useful, Google’s Social Connections section, which is basically a network of connections Google uses to identify relevant social search results for you. In other words, this section gives you a break down on how you’re connected to everyone, what channels Google’s looking at and so forth.

The system gives you an A to Z list of all your direct Google chat buddies and contacts, each which list the content you’re connected through, such as Tumblr, Twitter, Google Reader, YouTube, Facebook, Quora and all the other social networks we operate in daily.

Here’s a screen grab:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

I still can’t find a decent way of removing a connection. See, I don’t want to block a person completely, I’d just like to be able to remove the connection from my social search, guess we’ll have to wait on Google for that.

To access this information, click here (make sure you’re logged into your Google account first).

Google Social Search hitting South Africa

by Chris M on May 26, 2011 in Internet, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization with 2 Comments

So it’s official, Google Social Search is starting to work for us South Africans. I don’t know how many of you have noticed yet, but I certainly have and I’m still trying to decide if I’m happy with the results.

Here’s a breakdown on what this is all about:

“Social Search can help you find pages your friends have created, and it can also help you find links your contacts have shared on Twitter and other sites. If someone you’re connected to has publicly shared a link, we may show that link in your results with a clear annotation. So, if you’re looking for information about modern cooking and your colleague Adam shared a link about Modernist Cuisine, you’ll see an annotation and picture of Adam under the result. That way when you see Adam in the office, you’ll know he might be a good person to ask about his favorite modern cooking techniques.” (Chris M: rofl)

“So how does this all work? Social Search results are only visible to you and only appear when you choose to log in to your google Account. If you’re signed in, Google makes the best guess about whose public content you may want to see in your results, including people from your Google Chat buddy list, your Google Contacts, the people you’re following in Google Reader and Buzz, and the networks you’ve linked from your google profile or Google Account. For public networks like Twitter, Google finds your friends and sees who they’re publicly connected to as well. You can see a complete list of the people included in your Social Search results in your personal google Dashboard (this display is private).”

Google Social Search results look like this:

What I don’t like about this is that it would appear that Google’s gone an aggregated all the people I’ve ever been in contact with and therefore search results are appearing with items shared by people who I might have contacted before, but might not really want to know what they’re interested in – know what I mean? So, I’m investigating ways to unconnect from people, but it seems to be a little more complicated that I would have thought.

My first guess was Google Profile, so I looked there, found the list of users I follow and who follows me, so I unfollowed a number of people, but this didn’t help at all. I then read further and discovered that it pulls in GMail contacts as well, I looked into removing and adding people, this didn’t seem to end in the desired result either.

So right now I’m still investigating and still deciding if I actually want this to be part of my profile at all!

Have you seen Social Search yet? Have you figured a way you to remove certain people from your results?

UPATE: Terrance from countingbeans.co.za pointed out this link and it’s a winner: https://profiles.google.com/connectedaccounts

Social Media ROI vs SEO ROI

by Chris M on May 24, 2011 in Networking, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Video with No comments

This is a pretty cool, unstaged video which compares return on investment for social media vs that of search engine optimization. I like the video because it’s interesting naturally, but it’s also a conversation which leads to much discussion:

SEO is still growing in the consumers eyes

by Chris M on May 23, 2011 in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization with 2 Comments

I’m passionate about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and when I read articles and blog posts about SEO being dead or about to die, I immediately sigh at the pure ignorance that some people suffer. If someone said that traditional search was dying and that social search was taking over, I’d be more inclined to listen as I tend to feel that it’s not a complete inaccurate statement at all, but SEO, well that’s not dying at all, it’s growing, the bubble hasn’t even burst yet in my opinion and being on the cusp is hugely exciting!

Google Trends is a great platform for determining the world’s interest in certain terms and so I decided to run a trends search on “SEO” to see what the outcome would be, purely out of interest and this is what I saw:

Remember, it’s not what industry thinks per say, it’s what the consumer’s interested in, and the consumers clearly interested in SEO.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is following a similar growth pattern, although it appears to be even more active:

I find Google Trends fascinating and I’m always in and out of it testing various things. Anyway, point of this post was to show that SEO and SEM are most definitely not dying and I wouldn’t be surprised is the graph continued to go upwards for many months to come!

Google testing new SERP layouts?

by Chris M on May 10, 2011 in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization with No comments

Some images have been floating around today which give us reason to believe that Google might be looking into changing its search engine results page (SERP) layout. The design, which has slowly but surely changed over the years, has never really changed like this, well, not that I’ve noticed at least.

Take a peak:

I’m not sure whether this is real or speculation, but I can definitely see Google looking into something like this.

Is it time for a change?

Introducing Google Analytics Site Speed

by Chris M on May 4, 2011 in Search Engine Optimization with No comments

What happens when you visit a website which is incredibly slow? In most cases you get annoyed and leave, looking for an alternative site. This happens fairly often and if you’re the website owner, you don’t want this happening to you, that could be a sale loss right there!

Google Analytics has launched a new metric – site speed. Site Speed allows you to measure and view latency for a number of pages on your website. Because it’s Analytics, there’s tons of information available to you, such as seeing which pages are loading the slowest, your overall site load times as well as other important dimensions. If you think a little further, this would be incredibly useful for seeing how long it takes users located in another country to view your site. Another useful addition is the ability to see load metrics relative to the browser, operating system and so forth.

Optimizing your website for speed these days is crucial for several reasons. Google takes site speed into account for search engine optimization purposes, people on mobile devices have slower lines and thus cannot be expected to wait around and if you’re running an e-commerce website, you don’t want your shoppers to wait around whilst a cart updates or a checkout processes.

Robert Kingston wrote a great article on this topic and outlines that currently Google does not allow for sampling rates to be changed just yet, which means that only around 2% of the page views will actually be measured. This is obviously a really small sample size and measuring against this might not be completely accurate, so right now I think it’s great to explore, but perhaps we should wait before implementing.

Setting up Site Speed on your website does require you to add some code to your pages. It’s a pity that it isn’t included in the normal tracking code for Analytics, and then have an option in Analytics to turn it on and off, but that’s just not how they did it. If you want to look into adding Site Speed to your website, Google offers a guide on doing this.

This is an important addition for any website owner, be sure to explore this and understand it, decreasing your load speeds will keep your visitors and customers happy.

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