Search engine optimisation SEO & Internet marketing
Welcome to Blogstorm, the UK's most popular search engine optimisation & online marketing blog.
Blogstorm is written by Patrick Altoft, Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds based digital agency specialising in search engine optimisation, online marketing & web development.
If you are interested in working with Branded3 for search engine optimisation, Pay Per Click / AdWords campaigns or any other aspect of online marketing please get in touch.
Branded3’s expert SEO and social media specialists will be attending the TFM&A event in London next Tuesday to offer insights and tips on your campaigns and strategies.
If you head over to the VIP area in Earls Court 2, you’ll find the Branded3 specialists (with a cup of coffee in their hands) available to discuss any search, social media or other digital requirements you may have.
Attending the event is our CEO Vin Chinnaraja, Head of Search Tim Grice, Social Media Specialist Stephen Creek, and Search Expert Matthew Jackson.
Tim will be taking to the stage twice on Tuesday 28th February to deliver some expert talks. Firstly, at 10am in the Social Media Theatre, Tim will discuss ‘How to use social media to improve your SEO’. Read more →
Love-struck Facebook users can now mathematically calculate how likely their partners are to accept a marriage proposal this Valentine’s Day with the Branded3-designed Interflora ‘Love Machine’ Facebook app.
Our very own Design, Development and Social Media teams built the Facebook app to coincide with the most romantic day of the year, giving visitors the chance to find out whether 2012 will be the most romantic year of their lives.
As a Facebook user, you need only ‘Like’ the page to get the cogs and springs of the ‘Love Machine’ working.
Google has released an algorithm update today designed to penalise websites that have too many ads above the fold (in the visible area of the page). This is a great move by Google because nobody wants to see pages full of ads.
The problem is that Google is being very hypocritical here because over the years the amount of ads on the search results pages have been getting bigger and bigger. When you take into account YouTube and Google Places the space for organic search results (the only real content that Google offers) is getting much smaller.
As suggested in Googles blog post I went to their Browser Size tool to see how much of the Google search results were above the fold but surprise surprise the tool doesn’t work with Googles own websites so I had to load the pages via a proxy.
The screenshot below (click for larger version) shows the search results for “credit cards” in the UK and you can see how only 30% of users will ever see the top organic result without scrolling and only 20% see the top two organic results without scrolling.
Contrast this to the fact that 98% of people see the ad for Googles own credit card comparison engine and around 70% of users can see a total of 8 Google PPC ads.
This week Google has announced a major change to their search results called “Search plus Your World” which isn’t a particularly catchy title.
There is an excellent summary of this feature here and examples of how Google favours Google+ here – this post is mainly my thoughts on the service.
When I first tried the system yesterday afternoon I searched for “golf” and Google came up with pictures of myself and some friends on a golf holiday in 2005. For an average searcher they probably wouldn’t think this was amazing but I think it’s pretty mind blowing. To have Google searching the web and images stored in my Picasa albums is just amazing to see working.
I think the way Google has launched this is really clever. In the past both Twitter & Facebook have tried to stop Google indexing all their content and wouldn’t give them full access to crawl sites. Twitter used to give Google a feed of all tweets but turned that feature off and killed the real time search that Google used to show for breaking news events. Now that Google has launched with a massive favouritism for Google+ data we here Twitter making statements saying that this isn’t fair.
For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.
Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.
We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.
So Twitter stopped the agreement to give Google a feed of tweets and is now saying that this new system isn’t fair and wants to be included. All Google has to do is agree to include Twitter and ask for full access to data and Twitter will probably agree.
At the moment unless you use Picasa and Google+ or have friends that do then the new system isn’t a major change to the organic results. But once Google gets Facebook and Twitter on board as well as perhaps LinkedIn then this will be amazing.
SEO at present is about getting people to link to sites and the search results are based on a voting system that takes into account how trusted each linking site is. This has no relation to whether the person linking for the site is actually trusted by the searcher or not. I can see in a few years that Google will be focussing more on surfacing sites and search results that a users friends like as well as relying on links from sites that the searcher might have never heard of.
The new changes have a major impact on PPC. A search for “cars” brings up the Google+ results shown below for Ferrari & BMW above the PPC ads on the right hand side of the page. For BMW & Ferrari where PPC is mainly a brand play I’m sure they would much prefer to have their logo and a long snippet of text rather than a PPC ad, especially when it’s totally free.
Getting users to share your content on Google+, Twitter & Facebook has to be a part of your SEO strategy for 2012. Certainly brands need to be working on building up followings on these social networks every single month.
For those people who think this is the end of SEO I can assure you it isn’t. As long as people still search for things then there will still be sites needing to use SEO to get to the top of the list of search results. Whether SEO is about on-site optimisation, links or encouraging sharing via social media sites or some other method is irrelevant.
If you were to click on the Google logo on New Years day it would have taken you to the search results for the phrase “New Year’s Day” as shown in the screenshot below. When I looked at this the dailymail.co.uk advert stood out to me because although the Daily Mail isn’t noted for high level journalism I very much doubt they use PPC to promote stories.
Sure enough when I clicked on the ad it took me straight to a really really clever site about some kind of wrinkle treatment. The clever bit about this page is that it uses a geotargeting script to automatically insert the location of the reader into the paragraph so it looks like a local lady has reviewed it – try visiting via a proxy and watch the location change in the page. The page also has social proof with fake facebook buttons and logos of other reputable sites too.
The site is so clever that it took me quite a while to figure out whether it was real or not. The proof is that if you search via the image URL in Google images for “Emily” on the right of the page it comes up with an article on photoshopping showing the same before & after shots for a lady with a different name.
The really interesting thing for me is that they managed to trick Google into using dailymail.co.uk as a display URL. The target URL wasn’t a dailymail.co.uk one so it’s not some kind of XSS hack. I assume they are redirecting Googlebot to the dailymail.co.uk page and cloaking everybody else.
A little known feature of the latest iOS 5 software for the iPhone is that it disables cookies by default. I wasn’t aware of this until yesterday when I tried to book a hotel and was trying to browse three of the largest travel websites – Premier Inn, Late Rooms and Travelodge and none of them were working.
All these sites detect your user agent, set a cookie and then display the mobile version of the site. In iOS 5 this results in a redirect loop which I only fixed by enabling cookies in the settings, something that most users wouldn’t know they needed to do.
I’m guessing that there are thousands of sites out there that suddenly are seeing very low conversion rates from iOS 5 users. Certainly any sites that rely on cookies need to figure out a new way of working with iPhones.
This just goes to show the importance of a weekly reporting system that shows traffic and conversion rates for different browsers & operating systems.
There are loads of threads on various forums from users saying they can’t login to services after the iOS 5 update.
Searchmetrics published some research yesterday showing the winners and losers of the Google Freshness update but in my opinion the issue is a bit more complicated than this.
The freshness update is like an enhanced version of the QDF algorithm. QDF applied to searches that were trending whereas the freshness update applies to searches where a user is likely to need new information.
Brands
The big losers in this update are going to be brands. Anybody who has carried out a reputation management campaign knows that the golden rule is to first move the negative listings down to page 2 and then to take over the brands landscape with strong pages that are hard to shift – sub-domains, twitter pages, wikipedia pages and facebook pages are all good examples of pages that can keep negative results on page 2.
This worked fine in the past (unless there was a huge story that triggered the QDF algorithm) but now that Google is continually surfacing fresh stories the task of reputation management gets a lot harder.
A good example of this is a search for “Prime Visibility Media Group” an agency that has just been acquired by blinkx for £22m. Google is ranking 3 news articles higher than the official site in the organic results. There is a universal search news result at the top as well.
Looking at the brands we work with there are similar trends with fresh results appearing on lots of their brand terms. This is fine until a negative story appears.
Voucher Sites
Any voucher sites that rank for brand terms are going to struggle to stay ranking when news sites write stories about those brands. Looking at search results for a few brands now we are already noticing this trend. The freshness algorithm doesn’t seem to have been back dated (as far as I can see) to older articles so we are likely to only see a change in the brand search results when a new article comes out and is boosted by this freshness algorithm.
As a footnote I should point out that this algorithm doesn’t seem to have been rolled out in the UK as much as in the US. The example Google gave in their blog post was a search for “subaru impreza reviews” which on Google.com shows articles which are almost all from 2011 and a few from October 2011. Doing the same search in the UK shows a Parkers article from 2000 and and Autotrader one from 2008.
The “best slr cameras” example is better but there are still a few old articles in there. Perhaps sites are just not publishing articles on a regular enough basis?
Google is displaying some interesting behavior and is indexing Facebook comments even though they are behind a javascript loaded iframe.
The comments don’t appear in the text only cache but are showing up when you search for strings of text from the comments.
I’ve been searching for a few comments from techcrunch and they are not ranking very well. Certainly not as well as I would expect for such a powerful site.
Facebook previously said that users needed to use the Facebook Graph API to pull comments in if they wanted them to be indexed which resulted in a nice plugin being developed for WordPress.
Search engine optimisation is the process of tweaking a website to increase the number of visitors to the site from search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Here are Branded3 we specialise in both organic search engine optimisation (improving rankings in the “free” or “natural” listings) as well as working with clients to improve the Return On Investment of their pay-per-click or Google AdWords campaigns.
We strive to use social, ethical and natural search engine optimisation strategies which deliver long term sustainable rankings combined with speedy results.
Love-struck Facebook users can now mathematically calculate how likely their partners are to accept a marriage proposal this Valentine’s Day with the Branded3-designed 
