Step on it!

June 23rd, 2010
How fast can you go?

How fast can you go?

Speed matters.  On the internet, it won’t get you a ticket and it’s not even a waste of gas.  Today’s webinar, The New Google Algorithm – Structuring Your Website for Optimal SEO, emphasized quickness as one of the newly important factors in how sites are ranked on search engine results pages.

(Ben, as our resident speed demon, approves.)

Speed, in this context, is not about having a lead foot or even fingers that type so fast they can’t be seen.  The first crucial speed sector is how quickly pages load.  No one likes waiting for a page to load.  Google, in this instance, feels our pain.  Slow-loading sites are now penalized for essentially annoying users who want their results and want them now.

To be fair, Google has also demanded time-trials for its spiders.  Those little crawlers have to cover a lot more territory a lot faster than they used to.  Spiders now check out more pages and pages deeper within sites.  Quick!  Get those supporting pages updated before the spiders see them!

Additionally, new content from social media sources pops up quickly on results pages.  Someone’s tweet about an embarrassing accident with your product can show up on a results page above your home page.  Getting engaged in social media and participating in the conversations that are already going on out there about your products or services can help you lay claim to those real time search results, not to mention speedily respond to praise or blame.

The clock is ticking…

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Spiders on Caffeine!

April 7th, 2010

Remember health class, or drug prevention week?  That was the first time I saw the webs of spiders on various mood-altering substances, distorted and holey compared to the classic orb design.  In today’s webinar, New SEO Fundamentals in a Google Caffeine World, I learned, much as I suspected, that Google spiders were not included in the experimental data.

Google spiders thrive on Caffeine, much like the rest of us.  The new Caffeine algorithm they use to index webpages works faster and more thoroughly.  Imagine a denser web that attracts more flies and catches a greater percentage of them.

The caffeinated spiders want fresh content, and lots of it.  They want to have the content grouped together with a logical flow, like a morning paper separated into sections for news, sports, and entertainment to go with their morning coffee.  Of course, they’re checking their favorite blogs at the same time, not to mention keeping up with Twitter and Facebook.  You can give them what they want by optimizing your pages to appeal to them with keyword-rich content and organized silos of information.  You can catch their attention with new posts and tweets.  They’ll reward you with higher placement in the rankings.

But, much like many folks after too many double espressos, the spiders can be a little jittery.  If your pages take a long time to load, they don’t have the patience to wait.  They’ll skip to something that they can see right now.

What to do?  Pay attention to content and architecture on your site.  Get involved with social media to get yourself placed in the real time listings on results pages and to engage others talking about your services or products.  And, perhaps, pick up a cup of coffee.

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Education Friday! …On a Tuesday

January 11th, 2010

Thanks to our smart SEO Team (Antonio Espinoza & Mike Turner), we gathered on Tuesday to talk about the latest Google updates and how they will affect SEO early this year.  Here are some great answers to the questions we had during the presentation and some basic information on each topic–enjoy!

Topics discussed:

  • Google Caffeine Update
  • Google’s Real Time Search
  • Google Personalized Search Results

Google Caffeine

- Google is slowly rolling out this new algorithm and is currently using in one datacenter with wider usage this year.

- This particular algorithm indexes significantly more pages than the previous algorithm. This is important because the more pages Google indexes, the more competition you are going up against, meaning the more important to optimize your site to ensure that Google can crawl as many pages of your site as possible.

Real Time Search

- For certain searches that have enough social media content (It’s not yet known how many conversations trigger this) Google has started to show real time conversations about your business/keywords, often times above the organic listings. This is key because if you are not monitoring the conversations about your business/keywords you are missing a major opportunity to engage your prospects.

For example:

Google personalized Search Results

- Google has been customizing search results for some time now for those who are logged into with their Gmail accounts. Now, regardless of if you are logged in or not, Google will be serving up customized search results.

Here are some Frequently asked questions and answers that you may get from your prospects/clients:

Question: You say I’m ranked #3, but my computer says I’m ranked #7.  What’s going on?

Answer:  Are you logged in to your Google account?  If so, Google is remembering the links you click on and personalizing to what they think your preferences are.  If you are logged in, log out and try your search again. Here is a screenshot that shows what it looks like when you are logged in:

Question: I’m logged out, and it still is showing a different ranking than what you told me.

Answer:  Depending on what data center Google returns your results on, then there will be variations in search results.  Our server is based in Arizona, so we get results based around that.  If you’re in New York, your rankings are likely to be slightly different than ours.

Question: What if I’m logged out, and in the same data center as you, but still seeing different rankings?

Answer: Google has recently rolled out personalized results whether you are logged in or not.  Based on your search history, Google wants to provide more of what you are looking for naturally.

Google says that it does not always personalize searches, and you’ll know when they do, because there will be a button to the bottom-right of the search button that says, “View Customizations.” As shown in the below screen shot:

To get the same results do the following: You can always choose to disable the customization by either clicking “Web History” or “View Customizations”, and choosing the “disable” option.  After that, Google should not personalize your search results. Here is a screenshot of where the “Web History” button is located:

Final Question: I’m still worried about this Personalized Search.  What is this going to do to my site?

Answer: Google is constantly tweaking their algorithms, and we have the unique perspective of monitoring hundreds of SEO campaigns so that we can test what works and what doesn’t. Before the release of the Personalized Search feature on December 4th, Google was already personalizing searches, as long as you were logged in to your Google account.

From our experience, we’ve seen that when searchers are competitively shopping, they will most likely not convert on the first site they see.  They will do research, and as long as you’re within the top ranks, you will be found, making it more of a necessity to optimize your site to show up as high as possible for keywords that mean leads and sales to your business!

-Webmarketing123’s SEO Team

Hope you all had a safe and happy new year! Welcome, 2010!

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Posted in Google Updates, Search Engine Optimization, Webmarketing123.com | 13 Comments »