Most noticeably, the search engine seems to be putting more emphasis on the value of local search results. In some way, searches are now partly determined by where you’re searching from.

If this trend will continue in 2011, it will change the search engine optimization (SEO) playing field. Not to mention, it will boost the value of mobile SEO. If you combine that with time-based searches, the possibilities would be limitless.

Imagine walking in the mall and browsing the internet from your smart phone. Typing in a query from Google, like “clothes,” will bring back time and location based results. This means that the search engine can bring you links to the clothing stores in the mall, particularly the ones that have sales and promos.

Source: lastclicknews

To be fair, if you were a search engine and wanted to know what brands, websites, and general content people wanted to interact with online, where would you go first? It has an added benefit for those who think that the SERPs are a bit spammy (I’m not one of them, for the record).

One way of reducing the number of arguably lower quality websites would be to look at who the popular brands are in the social media space and try to reward them with more authority.

How can SEOs take advantage of what seems to be a clear shift toward sentiment as an extra factor in achieving better rankings?

A growing number of SEO techniques can be undertaken with SEO, and specifically link building, in mind — from PR and advertorials to advertising on relevant industry websites.

In 2011, I expect this to become more closely tied with clients’ overall marketing campaigns. The best way to explain this is with an example:

Client A is a retailer, looking to boost sales of a specific range of camping equipment products. Special offers, promotions, and TV advertising is all planned and will revolve around a creative execution involving a character who will appear in their ads.

The opportunities for SEO here are endless, and need to be part of the initial planning, not an afterthought. For example:

•TV ads to be backed up with a strong PR campaign, aimed at increasing the number of brand and URL links to the client’s site.

•The specialist nature of the goods is such that a blogger outreach campaign can be undertaken, looking for product reviews, advertising opportunities, contextual links, or at least deep links from these relevant sites.

•The ad campaign’s character will have a Facebook and Twitter presence. If it is an engaging campaign, they will get a lot of followers and their profile will have strong social signals, which can then add value when linking back to the site.

•Key influencers for this market on Twitter and Facebook can be contacted and encouraged to review products, follow the main character and will retweet, “Like,” and re-post special offers or product insights.

•A campaign to win a free camping stove can be run as an “online game” (like the “throw the penguin” game, for example) and embedded on blogger sites to increase usage. It can also contain backlinks.
This gives us a “natural” balance between followed and no-followed links, contextual versus brand and URL links, from a variety of highly relevant sources, and also leverages the social media “buzz” metrics as further opportunities.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3641643

Google Places Ellesmere Part of SEO in 2011

Google however has recently changed Google Local Business Center into Google Places, and has placed more emphasis on the data it contains. Searches for products or services in local areas, such as ‘SEO in Ellesmere Port’ for example, now show almost exclusively those businesses that have a Google places listing – meaning if you’re not listed with Google Places, you’re not ranking for geographical searches.

This doesn’t happen for every type of business at the moment, but we believe it will – and it will mean more businesses will either have to list their websites with Google Places, or miss out on the traffic brought by geographical searches.

This isn’t much of a prediction to be honest, but if you’ve never heard of Google Places, or if you have heard of it but haven’t bothered to add your business, you’d best act now before your traffic plummets from local searches.

Source: http://www.stuckon.co.uk/google-places-will-be-essential-for-seo-in-2011-3445.html

Sort by Attribute: order search results based on values of specific attributes
Restrict to Range: only return search results with attributes within a defined range

For example, if you mark up your pages with custom metadata attributes, like dates, ratings and prices, you can order your search results by these attributes, such as sort by date, bias towards highly rated items, or restrict to a specific price range.

SignonSanDiego.com, a California news portal, uses the new Sort by Attribute feature in conjunction with the Google Custom Search Element to render recent stories with photos in the results:

SignOnSanDiego uses the new sort operator. The sort operator comes in several flavors, from a mild bias to strict sort ordering; SignonSanDiego.com uses a strong bias towards the publication date to ensure readers see not only the most relevant, but also timely news.

To implement the new features, you must mark up the pages you are searching with the attributes you want to use. You can do this via PageMaps; the PageMap used by SignOnSanDiego looks like this:

SignOnSanDiego’s publication date is stored in the DataObject of type ‘date’ as the Attribute named ‘sdate’; to specify this field you combine the type and name into a single field ‘date-sdate’. To apply Sort by Attribute over date-sdate, you set the sort option in the search code for the Element as shown below:

…var options = {};options[google.search.Search.RESTRICT_EXTENDED_ARGS] = {‘sort’: ‘date-sdate:d:s’};customSearchControl = new google.search.CustomSearchControl(’000525776413497593842:aooj-2z_jjm’, options);…

The sort option {‘sort’: ‘date-sdate:d:s’} takes a combined attribute name, like ‘date-sdate’, and several optional parameters separated by colons. In this case, SignOnSanDiego has specified sorting in descending order (d) using the strong bias (s) flavor of the operator. Without qualifiers, the default is to use a descending order with a hard sort. You can also choose to sort in ascending order (a), or use a weak sort flavor (w) or explicitly specify a strict hard sort (h).

The sort option also enables the Restrict to Range feature. For example a site like SignOnSanDiego might enable users to search for articles published in the last week. To implement this, you can set the sort options to “date-sdate:r:20101206:20101213”. This again uses the combined attribute name (date-sdate), but instead restricts to the range (r) of specified values (20101206:20101213). Multiple operators can be combined in the sort option using a comma. For example, to combine SignOnSanDiego’s strong bias with the above date restriction, you would specify “date-sdate:d:s,date-sdate:r:20101206:20101213”.

The Sort by Attribute and Restrict to Range features are a powerful new set of options that gives you a great deal of control over your search application, allowing you to use custom attributes to order and restrict your search results in very powerful ways for your users. For example, a movie review site can display the most highly rated movies released within the last week by combining distinct attributes in the sort operator, e.g., “review-rating,release-date:r:20101206:20101213”.

A few more tips:

1. With custom data rendering, you can customize your results even further.
2. You can always validate your metadata markup with the use of the rich snippet preview tool.
3. If you are not using the Element, you can always use the same sort options in the sort URL parameter, e.g., “&sort=date-sdate”.

Source: http://googlecustomsearch.blogspot.com/2010/12/more-power-to-metadata.html

Instant Previews

First of all, it’s important to understand what the new feature does. When someone clicks on the magnifying glass on any result, a zoomed-out snapshot of the underlying page appears to the right of the results. Orange highlights indicate where highly relevant content on the page is, and text call outs show search terms in context.

Many of you have put a lot of thought and effort into the structure of your sites, the layout of your pages, and the information you provide to visitors. Instant Previews gives people a glimpse into that design and indicates why your pages are relevant to their query. Here are some details about how to make good use of the feature.

• Keep your pages clearly laid out and structured, with a minimum of distractions or extraneous content. This is always good advice, since it improves the experience for visitors, and the simplicity and clarity of your site will be apparent via Instant Previews.
• Try to avoid interstitial pages, ad pop-ups, or other elements that interfere with your content. In some cases, these distracting elements may be picked up in the preview of your page, making the screenshots less attractive.
• Many pages have their previews generated as part of our regular crawl process. Occasionally, we will generate screenshots on the fly when a user needs it, and in these situations we will retrieve information from web pages using a new “Google Web Preview” user-agent.
• Instant Previews does not change our search algorithm or ranking in any way. It’s the same results, in the same order. There is also no change to how clicks are tracked. If a user clicks on the title of a result and visits your site, it will count as a normal click, regardless of whether the result was previewed. Previewing a result, however, doesn’t count as a click by itself.
• Currently, adding the nosnippet meta tag to your pages will cause them to not show a text snippet in our results. Since Instant Previews serves a similar purpose to snippets, pages with the nosnippet tag will also not show previews. However, we encourage you to think carefully about opting out of Instant Previews. Just like regular snippets, previews tend to be helpful to users—in our studies, results which were previewed were more than four times as likely to be clicked on. URLs that have been disallowed in the robots.txt file will also not show Instant Previews.
• Currently, some videos or Flash content in previews appear as a “puzzle piece” icon or a black square. We’re working on rendering these rich content types accurately.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/11/instant-previews.html

Dan Forootan, president of EZ Publishing, suggested that email marketing provides a significant return on investment “without putting undue stress on your staff or breaking your marketing budget with high priced advertising campaigns”.

In an article for SmartBiz.com, he argued that because email newsletters, coupons, or announcements can all be forwarded on to others at the click of a button, email marketing is also a good way of reaching a much bigger target market without any further expenditure.

“If you do want to expand your reach, you can purchase supplementary lists to send your information at reasonable costs and a high return on investment,” Mr Forootan added.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, many brands are failing to embrace the tools necessary to measure the volume of sales generated by their email campaigns.

Source: equimedia.co.uk

While AJAX-based websites are popular with users, search engines traditionally are not able to access any of the content on them. The last time we checked, almost 70% of the websites we know about use JavaScript in some form or another. Of course, most of that JavaScript is not AJAX, but the better that search engines could crawl and index AJAX, the more that developers could add richer features to their websites and still show up in search engines.

Some of the goals that we wanted to achieve with this proposal were:

• Minimal changes are required as the website grows
• Users and search engines see the same content (no cloaking)
• Search engines can send users directly to the AJAX URL (not to a static copy)
• Site owners have a way of verifying that their AJAX website is rendered correctly and thus that the crawler has access to all the content

Here’s how search engines would crawl and index AJAX in our initial proposal:

• Slightly modify the URL fragments for stateful AJAX pages
  Stateful AJAX pages display the same content whenever accessed directly. These are pages that could be referred to in search results. Instead of a URL like http://example.com/page?query#state we would like to propose adding a token to make it possible to recognize these URLs: http://example.com/page?query#[FRAGMENTTOKEN]state . Based on a review of current URLs on the web, we propose using “!” (an exclamation point) as the token for this. The proposed URL that could be shown in search results would then be: http://example.com/page?query#!state.
• Use a headless browser that outputs an HTML snapshot on your web server
  The headless browser is used to access the AJAX page and generates HTML code based on the final state in the browser. Only specially tagged URLs are passed to the headless browser for processing. By doing this on the server side, the website owner is in control of the HTML code that is generated and can easily verify that all JavaScript is executed correctly. An example of such a browser is HtmlUnit, an open-sourced “GUI-less browser for Java programs.
• Allow search engine crawlers to access these URLs by escaping the state
  As URL fragments are never sent with requests to servers, it’s necessary to slightly modify the URL used to access the page. At the same time, this tells the server to use the headless browser to generate HTML code instead of returning a page with JavaScript. Other, existing URLs – such as those used by the user – would be processed normally, bypassing the headless browser. We propose escaping the state information and adding it to the query parameters with a token. Using the previous example, one such URL would be http://example.com/page?query&[QUERYTOKEN]=state . Based on our analysis of current URLs on the web, we propose using “_escaped_fragment_” as the token. The proposed URL would then become http://example.com/page?query&_escaped_fragment_=state .
• Show the original URL to users in the search results
  To improve the user experience, it makes sense to refer users directly to the AJAX-based pages. This can be achieved by showing the original URL (such as http://example.com/page?query#!state from our example above) in the search results. Search engines can check that the indexable text returned to Googlebot is the same or a subset of the text that is returned to users.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html

“Eh…what?” …said every SEO professional on the planet…

Google Site Clinic

Don’t worry, there are rules. You can only submit your site if it is a strictly non-profit or government site and they will be posting all the advice with screen shots of the websites etc so that all can benefit from their analysis and advice. Plus the offer is aimed at helping ‘beginners’ so will probably not uncover anything professionals don’t know already. Google has in fact already held a few of these clinics in Spain, India and Norway. Plus they have been providing similar SEO advice through a number of mediums for years so this really shouldn’t be anything to worry about.

If you have the right category of website then you can submit your site for the clinic by filling out a form. To be eligible you must:

• Be a registered non-profit organisation
• Must verify that you own the site via Google Webmaster Tools
• Make sure you site meets the webmaster quality guidelines.

If you fail to meet any of these points and you just have to get some inside SEO advice, you might want to try kidnapping Matt Cutts. Although he is a ninja so watch out…

Source: http://www.moovinonup.com/blog/google-offer-free-seo-review-analysis-advice-website

Neal Mohan, the vice president for product management responsible for Google’s display advertising products, and Barry Salzman, managing director of media and platforms for the Americas at Google, who runs display ad sales, envisioned a Web where the ads are more social, mobile and real-time — and a lot more profitable.

1. Google announced two new kinds of video ads for YouTube and predicted that half of display ads would include cost-per-view videos that viewers choose to watch. On YouTube, people will be able to skip video ads they don’t like after five seconds (and the advertiser won’t pay for those views) or choose which of three ads to watch.

2. Half of the audience will be viewing ads in real-time, Google predicted. That means changing elements of ads on the fly based on things like location, the viewer’s interests and the weather. Google demonstrated technology from Teracent, an advertising company it acquired, that changes a car ad depending on whether the viewer is in a sunny or rainy place, is a woman or a man, and prefers shopping or sports. The technology would allow “millions of possible permutations,” Mr. Salzman said.

3. Google has been talking for a while about mobile being a priority and predicted that cellphone screens would be the No. 1 screen for viewing the Web by 2015. In display advertising, that means using phones to bridge the gap between a magazine ad and an online ad. An app called Google Goggles already lets people take photos of things like a landmark to search for them on Google. Eventually, people will be able to take a cellphone photo of a print automobile ad, for instance, and see the car in 3-D, zoom in and visit the company’s Web site.

Find more here: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/google-predicts-more-social-and-profitable-display-ads/