With the launch of Google Instant, it becomes apparent that Google suggestions will become one of the most important keyword research tools. To celebrate the launch of Google Instant I’d like to present a selection of Google Suggestions fails which proves that the dark Magic of SEO may become just a little bit funnier soon.
You can read more about Pod1’s SEO Services London and general ecommerce design offered by Pod1.
Today Google has announced a real-time search overhaul called Google Instant. Google Instant presents search results that change as you type, a feature Google has been testing recently. The search giant revealed that Google introduces Instant in order to optimise the search process and shorten the time users need to find and click on the search result.
All signed in users in US will be able to start using Google Instant from today. UK, France, Germany and Russia will get it over the course of this week.
Instant results
Feature letting you see the results as you type
Set of predictions
Google will now show a grey text next to your search query. This grey text is what Google thinks you mean as you type and what set of results it’s showing currently.
Scroll to search
A very nice feature which changes the results as the user hovers over the suggested search term
Goggle has also announced that Google Instant will be coming to mobile search this Autumn.
Link building is one of the most important SEO campaign exercises. At the same time it’s also one of the most tedious and time-consuming activities. This is why it’s absolutely crucial to know how to measure and analyse all inbound links to your page and domain. Below is the selection of 5 best ( and free ) link analysis tools out there right now.
This is an essential tool for every SEO link building campaign, monitoring inbound links and researching bloggers outreach. It requires installation of additional Firefox plugin and the script runs a while but once that’s done then key features include:
Good link analysis tool showing instant results which include:
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
Open Site Explorer would be probably the best link analysis tool if only the free version wasn’t restricted to only few first results. Nevertheless, it’s a brilliant, well designed, quick and clever link research tool. Some of the features include:
http://tools.seobook.com/link-harvester/
Link Harvester is a useful link analysis tool which returns:
http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
This text link checker tool does look dated but it does what it’s supposed to, which is identifying inbound links which can actually hurt your website rankings instead of helping you to rank better. This tool will scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas.
You can read more about Pod1’s SEO Services London and general ecommerce design offered by Pod1.
What has been the effect of Google’s Caffeine update?
Google’s much anticipated new search indexing system update (Google Caffeine) has sparked a wildfire of comments on webmasters and SEO forums. Google claims that Caffeine allows them to increase the speed of its search results by 50%. They can achieve this near real-time result by not having to build up a queue of crawled websites waiting to be put into the live index but by adding every crawled page to the index instantaneously. It seems obvious that Google wants to get faster in indexing and presenting the content with Caffeine. They don’t want to be left behind considering the growth in real-time search and where Yahoo and Bing are going with their developments.
Although Google played down the significance of the Caffeine update on the search ranking algorithm, there are several things SEO experts should re-consider.
The page load speed became an important ranking factor since Google puts more emphasis on speed. Pages including ‘heavy-on-bandwidth’ elements will see a drop in rankings.
Brand engagement in social media and blogging has never been more important than it is now. Caffeine means that Google can display the high quality, fresh and engaging content within minutes of being published.
Across the whole range of Pod1 ecommerce design clients, we noticed only slight changes in the rankings where blog sections became more prominent in Google results. We are also seeing more traffic coming to some of the bigger brands websites from the ‘Related Searches’ links at the bottom of Google results page. This would confirm one of many Caffeine theories that Google is favoring the “authority web sites” even more than before.
You can read more about Pod1’s SEO Services London and general ecommerce design offered by Pod1.
As the SEO industry grows the number of keyword research tools grows along with it too. There are tens, if not hundreds, of keyword research tools and extensions utilising search engine APIs to present the user with all possible synonyms and relevant keywords.
One of the recent trends in keywords research tools development includes making the results more pleasant for the eye. They still use the same Google, Yahoo or other search engine’s API, but they can present the query output in a nice and logical way, particularly useful for those who prefer to see a visual representation of the data. Here are some of the best ones out there right now:
Very visual and useful keyword research tool showing the results in a tag cloud where keywords with higher number of monthly searches are displayed bigger and in different colours.
The monthly search volume is shown when you hover over the keyword. You can also add the keyword to the right hand side panel and then export all keywords to csv, excel or text file.
The keyword research tool also includes a 3D view of the results tag cloud:
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/
Although Thesaurus is not the first keyword research tool you would think of, it has a nice feature called Visual Thesaurus which is an interactive tool that allows you to discover the connections between words in a visually captivating display. Word maps let you search for just the right word and then explore related concepts, revealing the way words and meanings relate to each other. It’s a word-lover’s delight, with more than 145,000 words and 115,000 meanings organized in an innovative and intuitive design.
Just search Google for anything and switch the standard view to Wonder wheel view on the left.
Useful visual keyword research tool which allows you to see relevant search results to your query in a unique semantically relevant and graphically design way.
Google Trends is not a keyword research tool as such, but it provides extremely useful visual representation of the number of Google searches for the particular keyword during the chosen period of time. We found it very useful when planning the SEO strategy, especially for retail and travel ecommerce clients – you can easily spot when people search for holidays, resort destinations or specific gifts.
Google Sets is an experimental keyword tool at Google labs that creates sets of items based on a couple of seed keywords. You simply enter one or several words and the tool generates a list of related terms.
http://adlab.msn.com/Keyword-Forecast/default.aspx
This tool forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords. Enter keywords separated by semi-colons and click the submit button.
http://www.scotiasystems.com/keyword-tag-cloud/keywordcloud.php
This tool can be used to analyse keyword placement and frequency on any website. It displays a 3D tag cloud for each of the ‘SEO-sensitive’ areas of the page, e.g. different tag cloud for meta keywords, image titles, page titles, headings, etc.
You can read more about Pod1’s SEO Services London and general ecommerce design offered by Pod1.
Google has announced the latest change to their ranking algorithm on Friday 20th August in their Webmaster Central blog post. Google now shows more search results from the same domain. The search engine giant claims that “for queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, we’ll now show more results from the relevant site”.
For example, one of Pod1 ecommerce design clients, the women’s shoes retailer Kurt Geiger, has now 7 out of possible 10 search results for the query ‘Kurt Geiger shoes‘:
Although Google claims that they “expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page”, it’s arguable whether they should do it and if this is actually what users really want.
One thing is certain though. There are some very serious SEO implications that every search engine marketer should consider in near future. Firstly, the importance of a ’strong’ website domain is more important than ever. Secondly, SEO specialists and brand owners have to consider optimising the site for branded search terms as well as generic key words. Thirdly, the move has definitely favoured brand owners websites and has certainly disadvantaged affiliate / price comparison websites which traffic from brand name related search terms will drop as their listings would have suddenly dropped in rankings from position No. 2 or 3 down to No. 6 or No. 7 or even lower.
The algorithm update has already sparked a wildfire of comments in the search engine marketing community. Some say they really like it as it’s easier to find what they really want. Others don’t like it and they feel their choice is restricted when viewing search results. My personal opinion lies somewhere in between as I do think it’s a useful feature and will definitely help smaller businesses to defend their brand from more powerful comparison and affiliate websites. However, I also think that the number of possible listings should be restricted to 3 or maximum 4 top spots in SERP. My another personal disappointment was when I realised that the update is not resolving the issue that many big jewellery and retailer brands, including Links of London, face when dealing with fake website listings.
The new great viral video campaign from Lynx called the Wingman Academy was launched on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/lynxeffectuk?v=app_17037175766. Wingman Academy videos feature actor and comedian Russell Kane, who stars as a head of training academy for wingman. He ‘teaches’ his students how to help their mates to get the most beautiful girls.
In order to ‘graduate’ from the Lynx Wingman Academy, cadets have to learn how to resist the temptations from ‘F-16’ and ‘Tomcat’ – two gorgeous ladies in gold bikinis. They have to master many tactical moves, e.g. the ‘cockblock’ and go through some endurance tests like the ‘Chic Chat’.
Really good example of a clever and fun Facebook campaign. See another cool Facebook campaign – Perrier and Dita Von Teese together for a virtual date.
This is the second post on the subject of International SEO / Multilingual SEO (read the first one here: International SEO / Multilingual SEO – Part 1). It’s based on the knowledge and data obtained at the International SEO training course I attended in June at Econsultancy London. This post will focus on the global search behaviour, how different nations search the web and how SEO strategy should be adjusted when optimising ecommerce website for different languages and countries.
In March 2008, ComScore published rather interesting breakdown of all searches conducted in Europe.
This is always the first important challenge to tackle when implementing international SEO strategy. Should I translate and localise the whole website or would it be better to just build a cheaper landing page and keep the rest of the site in English? As always, it turns out that it depends. If you target Finland, Sweden, Norway then the landing page will be enough – the vast majority of population speaks and uses English online. Landing page should be also enough in Spain and France where relative quality of SEO is lower therefore it may be easier to successfully implement international SEO / multilingual SEO strategy on the website.
However, if your international SEO targets Denmark or Germany then the translated version of the website is a must. This is due to the high level of ecommerce websites saturation and high quality of local SEO. You should also translate the site when you think about getting into the Russian or Japanese markets as both countries trust websites in native language more, and users are more likely to buy from a localised website. In Russia, there’s also another important international SEO factor: Yandex (biggest search engine) prefers .ru domains hosted in Russia.
Having said all that, it’s absolutely crucial that each page is not only translated but also localised using search terms that real people are likely to search in this country. Also, there isn’t always a need for translations. In many countries, the English term or the mixture of English and native language is used more often than the translation. Both Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool and Google Trends are perfect tools for identifying these terms.
Image source: Oban
You can read more about Pod1’s SEO Services London and general ecommerce design offered by Pod1.
Some interesting social media facts & figures from the UK’s market (compiled by SimplyZesty):
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