Super Search Engine Marketing

Well google today announced what many of us in the SEO community have been seeing for the past few months, the update to it’s search engine called CAFFEINE.

But what does it really mean to the average internet marketer or website owner?  Not much really.  For the most part sites that are semi-static sales sites that are well SEO’ed are not going to be affected by Caffeine.  The only exception to this would be if one of your search terms suddenly becomes popular on the net for some reason.

What do I mean if a search term becomes popular? Well simply put say your search term is Caffeine.  Right now when you search google your going to find lots of blog entries like this one showing up as most relevant because lots of people are chattering in blogs, news articles, etc about google’s updated search engine that google is going to assume your looking for information about the HOT TOPIC OF THE DAY, which happens to be your search term.

This is something that is not totally new, it has been happening to a number of clients of mine for a while now.  For one reason or another some have been bumped down in ranking for a few days when one of their key terms is the topic of the day.  So from time to time if your keyword happens to hit the news or the blogs out there, then your likely to drop in rank until the term is no longer a HOT TOPIC OF THE DAY.

The other major change that I would be most unhappy about if I was an advertiser is the inclusion of local and shopping results.  As an advertiser to have someone local show up in search results that I am paying for with clicks is not something easy to overcome.  That has been one of the few unifying things with web advertisers.  They are all mail order over the net.  Well not anymore.  You search for something and you find advertisers listed and then you see a local business, your more likely to use the local result than the advertiser who may be thousands of miles away.

Google is likely to get some real negative feedback when search results are not returning what people are looking for.  They are likely to get even more negative feedback from advertisers who have to compete with “natural” local results for search terms.  Look for more changes from google.

In this 2 minute Video Cody explains about Google’s Golden Triangle and how it is so valuable to be in the top ranking positions.

Googles Golden Triangle

Google’s Golden Triangle Explained

Click the image above to view the Video

Google has released a beta of a new piece of software that runs with analytics and gives you various alerts.

Essentially this is like Google Alerts which scan the web for what you want to be alerted about, but is confined to your Analytics account.  So when something to which you have assigned an alert to happens google sends you a message.

The Alerts cover all things from if someone visits to your site as the result of a keyword search to other metrics associated with your ads, conversions and other information.   Frankly it is a bit amazing the various things you can associate with an email alert to you.

While it is still in beta, I would suggest that you set up various things that you want to keep track of, like where your getting traffic from, or when a keyword search results in a hit to your site, time on site for visitors is met or declining.. all kinds of alerts can be set up.

As always I am a firm believer in using Google Tools, especially new ones, as it shows your watching the net, your part of the “community” your an “active participant”, your on the “Cutting Edge” … your out there.

Sparky

IN a previous post I mentioned how google likes it when you use their tools on your website. Analytics, Webmaster, Google Check out are all great tools that google offers webmaster to use in their sites.

But what about the user? How about Joe Six Pack what are there for him to use, and webmasters/SEO specialists can use to our advantage.

The biggest un-talked about thing is Social Bookmarking.  Not many know about social bookmarking and if you search for other posts here you will find out what I am talking about.  Essentially like Digg, Mixx, etc… Google has it’s own bookmarking service.  You can find out more about how to install it here Google BookMarks. Basically this allows you like other bookmarking services to keep track of some of your favorite places on the net and allow Google to store them for you.

So how does this help out a website?

Well we all know that Google loves to gather data.  It’s essentially one of the greatest data miners that has been invented.  If it is on the web you can be certain that google has most likely scanned it and indexed the information.  This is how they determine what to show in a search result. Person types in what they are looking for, google examines the information it has mined and determines what is the best result.

But how does this help a website? Well what data do you think google takes as more important than other data it might come across?  Do you think that just cause it crawled and indexed your page that makes your page important?  Well look at your PR, look at where you rank for keywords.  Are you number one in search results?  Most likely not.  So your onsite and offsite SEO has not pushed you into even the first page.

I am clearly of the opinion that google likes itself and all the tools you have to use when making your website.  So what makes for a even better source of data for google to use in it’s determining what is a good search result for a user?  Data collected from other signed in Google users.

If anyone out there thinks that the SE that is hell bent on gobbling up all the data it can and is ignoring the data from it’s users (both signed in and not) would be simply foolish.  In fact I would venture to guess and research proves I am right, that google is giving more weight to what it’s users do than anything else.

Now the key is how to feed google information you want to show up well for.  The first thing you can do is go to the Google Bookmark link I gave you and if you do not already have a google account you create one and slowly start to bookmark your favorite sites.  Now the key here is that google has not really told or made widely public it’s bookmarking service.  It’s there, but it is not something like google image search that is right there on the front page of google, you have to look for it to find it.  So a great deal of care must be given when you start using the google bookmark service. You do not want to have too many bookmarks made of sites, at least at first, you certainly do not want to rush out there and bookmark your site as many times as you can yet.

The real key is making what your doing look natural. Would it be natural for a user to go out and just bookmark one site?  Would it be natural for a user to bookmark a hundred pages or sites in an evening? What would look natural, especially for a tool that is not widely promoted? Something slow and easy, building gradually over time.  Daily bookmarking of a favorite site would be fine, so long as it is not the same one over and over and over again.  Build a Bookmark profile that has all kinds of things in it the more the merrier, and along with all those other bookmarks you bookmark your favorite sites.

There is a second thing you can do to increase google paying attention to your bookmarks. Do a search first.  Search for the Keywords that your thinking your site should rank for.  Now look through the listings until you find your site.  Click on the link and go to the site.  Browse around the site, especially if the site uses analytics.  This makes it look like you searched for Flavored Coffee as an example and you found Coffee-n-Caffeine you clicked the search link, bingo a vote for a search link is in itself valueable to a degree, then you browsed around the site and bookmarked a couple of pages in the site as you traveled around.

What is this telling google? What this tells google is you were looking for flavored coffee you searched your found a site you liked and you bookmarked it.   3 points that google can look at and say, this must be the right kind of site for that kind of search. One you searched for a term and clicked on a site.  Two you traveled around the site, bookmarking things you like or want google to think you like.  Three Google analytics confirms that you went around the site.  All of these point to the fact that you as a user found the search result to be RELEVANT and if you found it relevant, enough so that you traveled to the site, moved around, bookmarked a few things and then moved on.  Is this a valuable source of data for Google to include in its search results?  In my mind yes VERY powerful.  You have just told the largest most used search engine YOU LIKE THIS STUFF.

So you give the data miner what they want… the gold.  Was this site relevant to the search they did?  Yea cause they clicked on it and traveled around the site.   Was the site so outstandingly relevant that you bookmarked various pages or the home page so you can remember where it is, obviously cause that is what you did.   Is that information then more relevant for other users? DAMN RIGHT IT IS.  The best metric google can use is what users like and don’t like.

WARNING THIS CAN BE DANGEROUS: There now as I say you have to be careful with this cause google can hurt you and hurt you bad if you do things the wrong way and do not make them look natural.  That is the key to all OFF SITE SEO is to do it naturally.  The more natural it looks the less likely google is to say wait a second something is not right here.

Happy Googleing

Sparky

Google is constantly making new tools available to not only the webmaster, but also to the user. In this posting I will focus on the tools to the webmaster, in another i will cover the user.

Among the tools for websites are:

- Webmaster tools – while these do not give hard core information they do provide an insight to a number of aspects to your site.  Key words, Links google has determined are important to your site, and to a lesser trusted degree the number of backlinks and the anchor text associate with them.  The last I consider to be more important.  While webmaster will never give you a look at all your backlinks it is certainly going to give you the ones google considers the most authority links.

- Google analytics – This is a way to measure the metrics to your site.  It will tell you how people are finding you from links from other sites to key words that people are using to find your sites content.  It also shows Google that your willing to share information about the traffic to you site and how people view your site.  Powerful data your turning over to a search engine and it will IMHO pay attention.

- Google Adsense and Adwords – while I do not recommend adwords campaigns for searches, as you can go broke real fast.  Campaigns on the Adsense content network will give you some impressions and also backlinks from sites that are content related. Adsense and allowing Adwords to appear on your site indicate a couple things.  First to google that you serious about making money, and you will make some, the second and more important is that it shows your customers that you KNOW your the BEST cause your not worried about the “competitors” and show that you know your product is best.  Think about the effect on customers if you walked into a store and there were ads for competitors?  What would you think?  You would be astounded right?

- Google Search – this allows people from your website to either search your site or to search google. Again you will make some revenue from it but more important like Adwords and Adsense and customers that your not afraid and your serious about making money.

- Google Alerts – these allow you to set up alerts for keywords and monitor activity on the net based on these keyword alerts.  While these are really only valuable if your watching your competitors again the more of googles tools you use the more I am convinced google will like you.

- Google Base or Merchant Center – these are great tools to show google your serious about your site.  Even submitting a small feed, updating it regularly shows google you want search results and your willing to go that extra mile to get them even if it means creating an XML file to submit to them.

- Google Docs – this is one you have to be careful with.  First cause your making possibly sensitive company data available for google to index and let loose in search results.  On the other hand, stuff you want google to index, along with links to your site, then this is a perfect tool to share more data about your site to google.

- Local Business Center – in my mind this is again something very powerful to google.  Not many people take advantage of it, but for certain keywords it again shows google your willing to use their tools to help customers to find your site.

- Gmail – this can be very powerful if you use it to send out emails to your mailing list.  Google already admits that it is scanning emails for links, the more links or times it sees your site being sent the more likely your going to get better results.

There are many more google tools that you can use and I will explain them in future posts as we delve into how the master data miner in the world is using that data to help sites rank better.

Sparky

Everyone is abuzz in the SEO world about the forth coming update to the search formula Google uses to show results called Caffeine.  The question on everyones lips is “What is gonna happen to my rank and position in the search results?”

It’s already clear to me that parts of the update are already being put out there by Google.  They do not want a repeat of the much Famed Florida update to search results.  So little by little Caffeine will be tossed in as incremental updates to the search formula.

But what is going to count to google to produce search results that are relevant to the user? Google has already indicated that it is going to try to go with more real time relevant results.  OK, what does that mean?  Google is going to look to see what is most active on the net for various terms, Google says it wants to crawl and index more of the net more frequently.  OK, so their bots are gonna be more active and looking for information from where?  Google indicates it is going to be watching the social networking items out there.  Things like Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and other social networking tools.  So what does this mean to the average retailer of a product or service who is ranking for a search term? Not much in my mind.  Unless your position changes regularly because one of your terms happens to make it into the news or gets tweeted about for some reason.  For a site like say my Gourmet Coffee site where my search terms are coffee related I do not think that Caffeine is going to make much of a day by day lasting impression.  However at moments when other coffee companies make a major move and happen to get tweeted alot it could change results temporarily.

My thoughts are that for most peoples positions you may see some minor shifts, either up or down depending on the changes made to the search results.  I do not think your suddenly going to find yourself rocket to the top or drop off google if your already ranking well for terms and getting traffic through those terms.

Sparky

You can dominate the results in Google for certain search terms.  Yea you can.  I currently hold links to 5 of the top ten sites listed in google for gourmet coffee blog and flavored coffee blog.

Not all of these results are direct links to my site, many are through social bookmarking sites that my site has been submitted to, article sites that are indexed by google.  None the less, if you search google for gourmet coffee blog, your going to find links to my sites coffee blog one way or another for half the top 10 results.

This is called dominating the top in google.  When you or your other properties are effectively bumping your competition out of the top ten so that you dominate google for a search term.

Sparky

Getting into the first page of Google is a mystery to many. How do you get into the tops in google, what do you do, what should you avoid?

Lots of questions with lots of people saying they know how to do it.  Do they? Some do, like myself.  Can they prove it?  Some can, I know I can.  A little over a couple months ago my Gourmet Coffee Site was burried in google for a variety of search terms.  Seeing that I already ranked in the Mid 50′s for the term flavored coffee I decided it was time to find a way to get into the first page.  Well I did it.  If you search google for Flavored Coffee you will find Coffee-n-Caffeine in the first page.

How I did it is really not that difficult to understand when you think about google and it’s engineers who fix the formula that google uses in order to give you the results you see.  That is the key, thinking how should we change the formula so that Important Sites show up first.

The first thing to think about is your site. is it coded so that google can index the site?  Do you have lots of Unique Content?  Do you add to your content regularly?  If you can answer yes to these questions, google notices.  Obviously if google can not crawl the pages of your site your content means nothing. If your content is good enough and is original then google says New Info we need to index and evaluate.  If your site is changing on a regular, or semi regular basis google comes back more often to see what is changing and index that as well.

Now google has your site, has your content why are you not showing up? Probably for a variety of reasons the most important of which is how many times is your site mentioned and linked to on the rest of the internet. This is kind of like a popularity contest.  The more sites that link to you the more important you are. The more highly ranked sites that link to you the more important your site is.  Think of it this way, your site is like a kid in highschool.  If your sought after and have lots of friends your considered to be more popular, and you have more friends and it becomes a viral sort of thing.

So how do you go about getting links to your site? One way is to use a technique whereby you trade a link from your site to other related sites in exchange for a link back.  Unfortunately if your site doesn’t rank very high other high ranking sites are not going to want to link to you.  So how do you get these links to your site?

One way is to write and submit articles to various websites. There are many websites out there that are essentially blog, and web 2.0 sites, that are a base of information for people to find information.  They use blogs, forums and other methods for people to communicate and share information with each other.  The greater the activity, the more popular the topic the higher the site will rank with google.

Another way is to use some of these same sites that will allow you to create profiles where you can put information about yourself in them.  In there you can put links to your site along with key words or phrases that you wish to rank well for.  These are called backlinks, one way links to your site which google looks at and says their is a link to your site and googles bots follow it.  The higher ranking the site the better the result.

The problem for most is finding these sites and getting yourself and your content into the sites so that you get the links back to your site. You can if you wish hunt these sites down, or you can hire people who will do it for you.  I have signed up with a number of services that allow me to submit articles, blog entries and other content out onto these sites.  I have also found so many of the sites that allow you to place a link to your site that between the two I can take a site that is not on the radar screen of google and put you into the top.

It is not a fast process. Anyone who tells you they can get you into the tops of google in a month… DO NOT BELEIVE IT..  Yea they probably can get you into google in a month, but you will not stay there.  These are called BlackHat SEO artists and while their techniques may work, they are more likely to get you banned by google.  Using natural looking techniques and providing content to the internet is a much better long term (3-4 months) way of getting yourself into the tops in google.  You do not want to ROCKET to the top, you want to climb to the top naturally so you do not get blacklisted by the search engines.

Sparky

Advertising on the net is an art form unto it’s own. There are so many choices to make.  In this section I am going to explain the Pay Per Click ads that are available to you.

First lets talk about Pay Per Click. You have been to google, yahoo, MSN, and done a search.  What do you see at the top and along the side when you search? Ads. These are Pay Per Click ads that are generated because the advertiser thinks that what you put in to search for is related in some manner to them.  Essentially the advertisers are bidding against each other for the placement of the ad, and also it’s position.  In some industries or markets, this can be very cheap for key words or phrases that people are likely to search for.  However if your trying to reach the most generic single term search your going to pay more to get a good position in the search results.  As I said the amount you bid determines where you show up. In some markets the generic key words are so expensive that unless you have a very big ad budget it’s best to stay away from Pay Per Click ads.

There is also an ongoing issue of are the people doing the clicking actually customers or are they bots or competitors trying to click you out for the day. Think about do you click on ads or do you look through what is called the generic search results?  Is there an advantage for a competitor to keep you out of a search term or run up your costs for ads?

Testing Pay Per Click ads, or at least looking at what it costs to get a good position is worthy of checking out for your site, however if you follow some of the other methods available most of which are free and generate real customers, your probably better off.

Sparky

Google itself offers up vast amounts of information on how it works, what it looks for and what it dislikes.  While they do not give away all their secrets, they have a patent on how they provide searches, they do lead you in the right directions.

According to Google they consider themselves as “an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned (“served”) to you.”

But how do they do this? Google says that this is accomplished with three things.  Crawling, Indexing and Serving.

Crawling is what their spider does. It “is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.“  They use large banks of computers around the world to constantly monitor the web.  If the stats from some of the sites I monitor are any indication, google bots are very active little creatures.  I have sites that google visits on average of 40-50 times per day with peaks of 300 visits per day.

As the google bot goes from one site to another it indexes changes, dead links, and new links, the links it follows around and sees where it takes them. It looks at information submitted for google to search by webmasters, like myself, such as sitemaps and other files placed in websites to direct its bot around to better index the site.

Google says that they do not use the influence of it’s ad generating side of the business to affect search results. There is no evidence of that this is true or not so we kind of have to take them for their word for it.  However search results on Google if you haven’t noticed are surrounded by ads so you can pay to get on the first page, if you have enough money.  I will talk about paying for advertising on the net in another article.

Next is the indexing of the pages. Google bots read the pages and catalogs the words it reads on pages and where they are located at in the page.  Quoting from Google 101 “In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.”

Next is serving up the information when someone does a search. According to Google they look at what the “querry” is and through the use of over 200 things they determine what it is that they are looking for and offer up search results.  One of the things they do note right away is they look at links coming into your site. “PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages.”  adding “each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank“.  Thus the importance of links from other sites.

Sparky

This is probably one of the more advanced areas of measuring of your sites performance.

Google allows webmasters and owners to track information that google itself is storing about websites it crawls. The information is vast and can be used to help further target your market and make your site perform better in the SE’s for SERP.

Google allows you to submit directly to google sitemaps of your site for their bots to crawl and index. This is probably one of the most useful tools as it assures you that your site is submitted and all the pages that google should crawl get crawled and hopefully indexed.  That is the other very interesting thing is that when it does crawl the sitemap it tells you how many pages are indexed by google.  Hopefully the two are the same but if they are not, then you know there are pages to do some work on.

Google also tells you other things about your site. Like do you have duplicate page titles, content, various other sorts of things that it finds as negative about your site. This is usually why some pages are not properly indexed.  As an example my Coffee-n-Caffeine.com website had some short meta tags.  Not something that was too big a deal on a site with almost 2o0 pages to not have 10 of them properly indexed.  However since I found that and I fixed that now all the pages are indexed by google.

Google also provides information about what people are searching for which they have clicked on your link to go to your site from google. This information is invaluable, it shows what people are looking for that leads them to you, and also what they are not finding you for.  The details that google provides to the webmasters and owners of sites can be of tremendous value in futhering your SERP and also your market share.
Sparky