Search Plus your World with Google
Last week Google made some changes to your search results. If you have a gmail and Google + account, and are logged in at the time of performing a search, you will see personalized results. They are calling it Search Plus your World. We noticed this change last week, and this is really promoting your friends and professional Google + connections.
What is Search Plus Your World showing you?
Personal Results
The new “Personal Results” view that appears in your search results now personalizes the search result listings you get based on both your social connections and your own search behavior. In addition, content that’s been shared with you through your Google+ social network connections now also appears in results. According to Google “The social search algorithm and the personalized search algorithm are actually one algorithm now, and we are merging it in a way that is very pleasant and useful.” They are featuring Google + content as well as photos that have been shared on it. If you look at the image below of a search result for Vab Media, it shows the first result is our Google+ business page and then it shows links and images we have shared on the G+ plus network. This is a nice personal search feature.
Google profiles are featured more now
Another important algorithm change is how people with Google+ accounts are going to be featured more in Google search results. The search results themselves are devoting much larger emphasis to displaying material from a Google+ person or Google+ Business Page. The results individuals see are now catered toward people in their own social networks, quite similar to how Facebook’s algorithm works when you search for people on FB.
People & Pages Suggestions
The final algorithm roll out is Google’s suggestions for people and pages on Google+ to follow. These will appear on the right-hand side of your search results, when Google decides they are relevant. Perform a search for movies or music and you will see many suggestions. You might see well known or famous people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. Google is allowing you to be able follow them and connect with them on their Google+ social network.
Our conclusions
Overall, we find the integration that allows for searching through private and public material interesting. We think many people will find some value in it. If you don’t want these personal and private search results you can search in google chrome incognito mode or log out of your google account to get just public search results.
This opens up a whole world of possibilities for entrepreneurs, bloggers, and business owners. Now, you can promote your services to your colleagues and friends. You’re in their circles, so now you just need to put your most popular links on Google + Social Network. Contact us for more marketing ideas and questions. Read the actual article from Google below.
“Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.
Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.
We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:
- Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
- Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
- People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.
Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started.” -Amit Singhal, Google
Contact us for a consultation & quote
*A disclaimer from Vab Media: There’s been a lot of controversy in the web world and SEO community that the Giant, “Google” is promoting its own products in search results. Whether this is true or not is not for us to decide. We just want to let small business owners know about certain changes and how they can take advantage of Google’s Search Algorithms, even in the case that they may change in the future.
Read MoreFoursquare helps you get more foot traffic…and now.. more brand exposure
Both Foursquare and Facebook allows users to check into their place. Create a Foursquare brand page for your business.
We recommend using both, but in this post, we’ll talk more about foursquare because it has a lot of cool features that not all businesses may know about.Why use both? Different perks for different customers- not all your customers will check in through Facebook, and foursquare users are accustomed to receiving the badges earned on Foursquare; Foursquare embraces the gamification of social media.
What are badges?
Foursquare gives out special badges depending on the type of check-in:
If you check into a movie theatre, you get the popcorn badge, If you check into somewhere for the first time you get the newbie badge. If someone checks into a business many times, they can eventually get the mayor badge.
If a person becomes a mayor, business owners should respond to that appropriately. Not only is that person a loyal customer, but they are publicizing they are at your location. So if you aren’t taking advantage of that free publicity, you should. In order to take advantage of this free publicity, you should set up a campaign that gives your customers special treatment for checking into your place often, for the first time, when they bring a friend or two.
Whether your customer checks in with Facebook places or Foursquare, either one allows users share their status update to Facebook, but only Foursquare allows users to share their status update to twitter and facebook. If they have their twitter account connected to Linkedin, their Linkedin contacts will also see their location. Either way, each one has its advantages, but setting up both could help you grab a higher percentage of market share.
Foursquare, however, has a few more things that would give you even more visibility. Here’s a little more about how you can use foursquare to invite repeat customers:
In addition to offering a special deal to clients that check in to your location for the first time, you may also write a tip, that will allow customers that check in to a nearby location to see your “tip.” This tip could go like this, “Since you are at….(nearby location)….Check out (your Location).” You should especially do this if you know there is a nearby location that gets more foot traffic than you normally do.
Likewise, share the love and place tips about businesses around town. It will not only show that your business is happy to live in that area and promote local businesses, but may also get you some exposure. You may do this with your own profile, your business profile, or your business brand page.
Business brand pages are new on Foursquare. Foursquare has been an app that local businesses use to get clients., but now brands can put up brand pages. What does this do? It allows brand pages to place tips about places around town and tips that you feel are relevant to help promote your company from the Website or on a iPhone.
It allows you to showcase your brand to locals and those visiting your local town, so that they recognize your brand. See the check-in snapshot of Vania’s iPhone after she checked in to Cruzio. It shows Vab Media placed a tip! Cool. To get started, you can go to foursquare.com/create_page and put in your companies information. A Foursquare brand page has the potential to become an essential social platform in a world where businesses are using social media tools to get their name in front of as many people as possible.
Contact us for quote on social media marketing campaigns and tutorial prices and visit our blog for more info.
Ten Most Recent Google Search Algorithm Updates.
Google has just announced its ten most recent important algorithm changes yesterday on their blog Google Insights.
We have been noticing many search engine changes lately.
We wanted to analyze a few of the algorithm changes that we think our important to webmasters and website owners. There are 3 out of the 10 that we would like to talk about in a litter further detail.
1) Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content
“This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.” -Matt Cutts
The above paragraph points out that Google is starting put more attention to the text in “Actual Page Content” than headers and menu content. This approach conforms to what they’re looking at from a “inbound links” or back-linking point of view as well. They seem to be putting more emphasis to links from the actual content body of the page than the header, side navigation or footer links. So, make sure that the actual body of your text includes your most important search terms. Don’t overdue it though with the amount of links.
2) Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors
“We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.”-Matt Cutts
I myself, have been noticing lately in search results that the exact keyword phrase anchor text is not always the deciding ranking factor lately. We don’t know if this has been abused by people wanting to fool the search engines. Google seems to paying more attention to the page content than the backlinks. They’re also say they are de-emphasizing the “exact anchor text” backlinks. This means you should look at altering your “exact anchor text” approach if you have not already done so.
Let’s say that you wrote a blog titled “Private Jets”; if you build links to this page only with the “Private jets” anchor text, Google might see it as possible spam. That’s why the anchor text strategy should be diversified and not concentrated on only one or a few phrases. Instead you can also use “Luxury jets, private planes, Gulfstream” etc. This will be much more effective. If you need help in finding semantically related synonyms for a specific search term, just use the “Google Suggest” feature for terms that Google thinks might be relevant for the term “Private Jets”. Or look at the bottom of a page for other search terms that Google is suggesting.
3) Fresher, more recent results
“As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.”-Matt Cutts
Business websites that have news in their content will benefit from this. This means that you need your update your content more often now. We would suggest you to get a list of your most read or visited / converting pages from Google analytics and create a schedule to update these every 30 days or so. You can make slight changes to the content of a page. If you do not update content, you might see your search rankings drop, as fresher content becomes available elsewhere. It will help if you have a dynamic sitemap, which will reflect the “last update” dates and times. This is very important algorithm change. These are just a few of the 500 algorithm changes that have happened over this past year. It is good to stay up search engine news in order to protect your business online. We would like to know what other website owners think about these changes?
Below is a copy of the changes as worded by Google webmaster Matt Cutts:
- Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
- Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
- Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
- Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.
- Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
- Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
- Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
- Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
- Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
- Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.
Are long-Tail Keyword Phrases good for my Business?
What is a Long-tail keyword phrase?
Search engine algorithms’ are getting more complex and are always changing.
This description explains indexing, “ When a website gets crawled by search engines, the search engines use automated software programs known as bots or spiders to survey the web and build their data bases. Web documents are retrieved by these programs and analyzed. Data collected from each web page are added to the search engine index. When you enter a search query at a search engine site, your input is checked against the search engine’s index of all the web pages it has analyzed. The best urls are are then returned to you as hits, ranked in order with the best results at the top. The most common form is text search on the web. Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords.” -Monash.com
All indexable words within a page, are used by google bots to display the most relevant search results. Of course, the repetition and placement of consecutive words are some of the biggest factors that search engines use.
Another difference worth noting between short and long tail keyword phrases are the search results. If you were to search the keyword “renovation” in Google, you will receive 109,000,000 results. Then, if you look up the short tail keyword phrase “home renovation” in Google, it returns 18,900,000 results. Finally, if you enter the long tail keyword phrase “home renovation contractors in Greenwich, CT” , it provides 270,000 results. Although the long tail keyword phrase is searched less than the shorter keyword phrases, there is much less SERP competition.
Another reason to include multi-key word phrases into your content, is that they tend to be easier to rank for, compared to generic single and double keyword phrases.
As another example, if you tried to rank for the keyword phrase “home renovation” you will be facing huge competiton from big renovation brands like HGTV and the show This Old House. These kinds of brands tend to have more authority, money and a higher PageRank than regular construction companies or businesses. That’s why we are suggesting to our clients, the use of targeting more location specific, longer tail keyword phrases.
Using long tail keywords to corner a smaller market has just as much potential, if not more, than using short tail keywords in a larger, more exposed market. Some sites may find that the long tail isn’t quite as useful in their market, while other sites will do far better by targeting the long tail. Either way, using long tail keywords where you can, will definitely give you the advantage over your competitors.
Research on recent search trends in the last few months has shown that long-tail searches of five-plus words used increased by an average of 7%. Also, 75% of the websites that were studied saw a decrease in the number of one- and two-word searches. Since last December’s launch of Google Instant, a new search enhancement that shows results as you type, most searchers prefer a more refined search. Given this info, it’s good idea to analyze your website and to ask yourself these questions:
- Is my site optimized enough for Long-tail searches? Will it rank organically as search queries become more and more refined?
- Does my website incorporate a strong link building strategy for mid- to long-tail keywords as anchor text?
- Is my website optimized to allow bots to crawl and index the deep and potentially long-tail keyword pages?
Bing integrates Yahoo traffic data into webmaster tools.
Google dominates roughly 65 percent of the search market. While Youtube, Yahoo and Bing are constantly fighting over the remaining market share.
Last month the merger of Microsoft webmaster tools and Yahoo site explorer was announced. This change comes to help webmasters since yahoo’s search traffic tool Yahoo Site Explorer is set to shut down later this year. This has been the primary webmaster tool for those looking to optimize for Yahoo. After all Yahoo sites have migrated to Bing-powered search results.
“Once organic results are transitioned to Bing in all the markets, we plan to shut down Yahoo! Site Explorer,” stated Hemant Minocha, Product Manager of Yahoo Site Explorer. He further stated that, “Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools will be the source for Bing and Yahoo! webmaster site and analytics data.”
Bing recently announced new features to its Webmaster Tools that will show traffic stats from Yahoo directly in the Webmaster Tools reports. While this move appears to be the start of integration, Duane Forrester, senior program manager for Bing Webmaster Tools, suggests it’s not really the start of something new, per se.
“Data integration is important because it gives you a true sense of what Bing is serving and where you are being served by Bing,” Forrester told Search Engine Watch. “Whether it’s on Bing or Yahoo, it’s all Bing and this is why we’re doing this.”
Bing Webmaster Tools will now be showing integrated data from Yahoo within certain areas and reports. Given the combined effort the Search Alliance represents, it makes sense to showcase relevant data from both engines within a webmaster account. Most areas and data within the accounts will not be affected. The short list of areas you will notice changes in are as follows:
To see this new, integrated data, click the Traffic Summary Report or Page Traffic report under the Traffic Tab
- Impressions – will go up based on combined data numbers
- Clicks – will go up based on combined data numbers
- Click Through Rates (CTR) as appropriate from above (change only due to the mathematics involved in the first two items)
Impressions data will rise because we will now be showing you combined impressions for your listings across both search engines. For each query term in the list within the report, your impressions represent the combined number of times your result showed, based on queries initiated by searchers at both Bing and Yahoo. Clicks data will follow the same pattern. CTR data is a factor of the first two items, and will rise or fall based on searcher click activity at each search engine. -Bing webmaster tools
The changes affect the numbers shown only. No actual rankings will be affected by the combining of data within Bing Webmaster Tools. As a visual reminder that data is now combined, you will see both the Bing and Yahoo logos directly above the graphs shown on these pages.
At this current time the data will be combined, not separate. The data will also update in any market where Bing is powering Yahoo search.
“Any optimization that you do on Bing Webmaster Center tool will be reflected in Yahoo! organic search results,” stated Hemant Minocha, although he clarifies that some areas of the world are still on the pending list for transfer to a Microsoft-powered back end.
You now will see both the Bing and Yahoo logos directly above the graphs shown on these pages. Many people really like the accuracy of Yahoo’s site explorers back-link data over Google web master tools. We shall see if Bing can continue to innovate it’s search engine and web master tools, to be able fill the void for Yahoo site explorer’s departure.
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Helpful tips for optimizing videos and content for search engines
Here are some basic tips for video search engine optimization (Video SEO).
The integration of videos is by far the most important of Googles Universal Search integrations with at least one video included in nearly 50% of search queries. This presents an awesome opportunity to quickly get on 1st page for your keyword phrase search results with just a few videos. Nevertheless, not enough businesses have been capitalizing– only a small percentage of websites are actually optimizing their existing video content. 
Choose keywords for video. Just like the Google adwords key word tool, their product Youtube also has a keyword tool. https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool provides the opportunity to examine search volumes for individual keywords. With this you quickly get an idea of which keywords are relevant for video optimization. Keywords that have a high search volume here are also often displayed right at the top of the Universal Search integrations in the normal Google SERPs and therefore have a higher click through rate.
video appropriate keywords are keywords where a user will often click on videos in the search results or where the search query is made up of their [existing search] + video. With this kind of keyword, videos provided with prominent video integrations will feature prominently in SERPs. YouTube is the most important video platform and has just recently surpassed yahoo as the second largest search engine in the world and, with a large online community, powerful marketing tool for companies.
Here are the some tips that will help your video get more views and rank higher in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs):
- Content: As with your website’s content, your video content should also be relevant, clear and crisp. It should be able to convey the message in an interesting or different way.
- Title: should contain the most important keywords, arranged with the most important keywords first. keep the title around 60 characters, any more will not be displayed.
- Description: video’s description should contain the keyword more than once and should use additional, semantically related keywords to avoid keyword stuffing. Which means you can simply use alternative terms that describe the same concept and thus strengthen your foothold for all of the related terms of that subject.
- Keywords: Add your keywords in the content or description of your video. Even your video transcript should be keyword-rich. Adding a relevant transcript serves more than one purpose- your video becomes accessible to people with hearing disabilities as well as it becomes relevant for search engine spiders. The filename of the video should also contain the keywords.
- Tags: Add up to 10 or 15 tags – using the most important keywords.
- Comments: Allow viewer comments and feedback on your video. The more people talk about your video, the higher will be your ranking on search result page.
- Linking: Link your video to relevant content on your site. While linking ensure that appropriate keywords are used. Also make your content relevant so that others link to your video too. More the number of inbound links, higher will be your ranking.
- Sitemap: Add a video sitemap, submit video sitemap to search engines. This will help web spiders to index your video more easily.
Contact Us For A Quote On Video SEO
Video SEO Ranking Factors to Consider
- Keywords in title
- Number of views
- Number of comments
- Category & Tags
- +1/Shares/Tweets/Embeds
- Favorites
- Ratings
- Sentiment (Like/Dislike ratio)
- Channel views
- Number of subscribers
- Links
- Embeds
- Video Sitemap
- Channel login activity
- Speed & consistency of interest
- Quality description (click-thru factor)
- Flags (negative)
Check out our Portfolio of Search optimized Videos we have produced and Marketed for clients.
Vab Media and Muse Cinemedia will be speaking on August 2nd, at Santa Cruz Business Connect about conceptualizing and marketing videos for business.
Read MorePost Google Panda factors to think about besides Page Rank
Having a high Page Rank for your site is good, but it’s not the only factor that determines your website’s relevance in terms of search results.
What is the real end goal to having a successful site on the web? To make more money, attract more visitors and readers right?! It is impossible to know and understand every search metric and algorithm being used, since Google uses more than 200 to determine search engine result pages (SERP). In the post panda era, creating your sites content with the reader’s experience in mind is a good place to start. Google Analytics is a helpful tool to use for measuring your site’s web traffic.
The more you think about the visitor experience when creating robust content and adding pictures the better off you will be. These metrics are important to look at for the user experience. In the post panda seo environment, the amount of time users stay on your website will play a role in how Google views your site. Seomoz did a whiteboard friday a few weeks ago about post panda and your site, they went into a lot detail about this subject.
“Finally, you are going to be optimizing around user and usage metrics. Things like, when people come to your site, generally speaking compared to other sites in your niche or ranking for your keywords, do they spend a good amount of time on your site, or do they go away immediately? Do they spend a good amount of time? Are they bouncing or are they browsing? If you have a good browse rate, people are browsing 2, 3, 4 pages on average on a content site, that’s decent. That’s pretty good. If they’re browsing 1.5 pages on some sites, like maybe specific kinds of news sites, that might actually be pretty good. That might be better than average. But if they are browsing like 1.001 pages, like virtually no one clicks on a second page, that might be weird. That might hurt you. Your click-through rate from the search results. When people see your title and your snippet and your domain name, and they go, “Ew, I don’t know if I want to get myself involved in that. They’ve got like three hyphens in their domain name, and it looks totally spammy. I’m not going to get involved.” Then that click-through rate is probably going to suffer and so are your rankings.” – Seomoz Rand Fishkin
Below are a few definitions from Google web master’s latest blogs about this subject:
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate
- Clickthrough rate (CTR)
Conversion rate
A “conversion” is when a visitor does what you want them to do on your website. A conversion might be completing a purchase, signing up for a mailing list, or downloading a white paper. Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your site who convert (perform a conversion). This is a perfect example of a metric that, unlike PageRank, is directly tied to your business goals. When users convert they’re doing something that directly benefits your organization in a measurable way! Whereas your PageRank is both difficult to measure accurately, and can go up or down without having any direct effect on your business.
Bounce rate
A “bounce” is when someone comes to your website and then leaves without visiting any other pages on your site. Your bounce rate is the percentage of visits to your site where the visitor bounces. A high bounce rate may indicate that users don’t find your site compelling, because they come, take a look, and leave directly. Looking at the bounce rates of different pages across your site can help you identify content that’s underperforming and point you to areas of your site that may need work. After all, it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if most searchers are bouncing off of it as soon as they visit.
Clickthrough rate (CTR)
In the context of organic search results, your clickthrough rate is how often people click on your site out of all the times your site gets shown in search results. A low CTR means that, no matter how well your site is ranking, users aren’t clicking through to it. This may indicate that they don’t think your site will meet their needs, or that some other site looks better. One way to improve your CTR is to look at your site’s titles and snippets in our search results: are they compelling? Do they accurately represent the content of each URL? Do they give searchers a reason to click on them? Here’s some advice for improving your snippets; the HTML suggestions section of Webmaster Tools can also point you to pages that may need help. Again, remember that it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if searchers don’t want to click on.
google-panda-update
Conclusions about Page Rank and Search Engine Page Results factors to keep in mind.
PageRank is just one of many ranking factors used to determine ranking in search results. Try to improve your website’s speed or loading page time. Studies show faster sites create a happier user experience. When a site responds slowly, visitors get impatience and spend less time there. Sometimes using flash and image sliders can slow down your website. These are just a few of the 200 metrics Google uses. Of course relevance of a page is still the biggest factor in search results. The anchor text of a link is usually far more important than whether it’s on a high PageRank page. And having lots of high quality backlinks is also important in search results. If you really want to know what are the most important, relevant pages to get links from, forget PageRank. Think search rank. Search for the words you’d like to rank for. See what pages come up tops in Google. Those are the most important and relevant pages you want to seek links from. That’s because Google is explicitly telling you that on the topic you searched for, these are the best. Feel free to visit our other blogs for more useful information.
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