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…

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 4^th, 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!