The main problem for Google in the past was deciding which comments were legitimate and which could be considered “comment spam”. This 3^rd party system would allow Google to assign less value to comments that would be seen as manipulative and more value to “useful” comments. Google would track the overall Google activity of the author of each comment by tracking their Gmail, Google+ and Youtube usage. Commenters would have to build up their credibility with Google to have their comments seen as having SEO weight.

It goes without saying then that we have seen the end of “NoFollow” tags on comments and as long as Google sees the authors of comments as credible, link juice will be passed on to the sites which they link to in the comments. Google will however limit the value of excessive links from legitimate commenters over a short period of time, so commenters would be advised to use this tactic sparingly. The highest value would be given to links that are on-topic, haven’t been posted an inordinate amount of times and have good click-through rates.

So it would appear that Google has created a very enticing commentary system that webmasters should definitely consider implementing on their websites, although it’s way too early to say if Google will give adopters of its commentary system preferential treatment in their algorithm. We feel that the SEO implications of this system are significant enough to warrant adoption. Promoting Google+ does seem to be the priority of Google at the moment, and this system proves that point.

It has been my own experience that apart from being a costly exercise, it most often yields poor results, certainly not worth the herculean effort put into it nor the barrage of angry competitors threatening to sue you , no matter how feeble their claims are. The simple fact is that bidding on competitor brands terms is completely legal and allowed on major search engines, provided you don’t mention your competitor’s brand in your own ad.

However competition is all about options and by not bidding on competitor’s brands some may think that you are taking away the consumer’s right to choose. By positioning your ad next to your competitor you are proving that you are offering the public alternative choices.

Competitor brand bidding would work to the advantage of the start up businesses who place their ads alongside their well established counterparts, thus gaining exposure while riding on the coattails of the bigger brand. However you should note that if you are planning on bidding on competitor terms that your own brand’s website is up to standard and that you offer competitive products otherwise you could do more harm than good to your brand reputation.

Bidding on competitor keywords is a practice to follow with caution, and needs to be evaluated depending on the type of product or service you offer.

Happy Marketing!

Many sites out there are in existence to make money and one of the most common ways to do this is through advertising. Google understands this, especially as it is thanks to advertising that Google has become the internet giant that it is. However there are sites that go overboard in this respect with big blocks of ads above the fold. Google says that less than 1% of searches will be noticeably be affected by this algorithm change, but webmasters and designers alike should take note of this. Using this method of adverts first and content later could negatively affect a website’s Search Engine Optimization efforts.

Google stated that webmasters who believed that their websites were negatively affected by this should consider how the website uses the above-the-fold area and whether the content on the page is hidden or otherwise hard for users to read quickly. The type of device used to view the website is also a factor. Webmasters are encouraged to use Google’s Browser Size tool to see how their website is viewed on screens of different sizes and resolutions. A webpage’s content might be easily accessible on a PC, but hidden on a mobile device.

The best advice is to keep the advertising near the bottom and the sides of the webpage and the content near the top. This will also help the Googlebot read / index your website quicker.

In true Google philosophy and all in the name of making the web a friendlier, easier place to be, this is just one of the 500+ changes that Google has undertaken to make to their algorithm in 2012 .

Dynamic Search Ads target relevant searches, serving Ads generated directly from your website dynamically.  Google is constantly indexing pages on your site, they have now found a new way to use the freshness of content to reach users. When a search occurs, an Ad is generated with a Headline based on the Search Term & Ad Text based on your most recent/relevant landing page. The Ad competes in the ad auction as normal & is displayed if a winner, searches where the campaign has an eligible targeted Ad the dynamically generated ad will not be entered into the auction.

In this way, Dynamic Search Ads offer increased exposure for your product, clicks & conversions are increased on your Ads without much effort & Ad serving remains relevant as ever without interference to your existing keyword campaigns.

16% of searches which appear on a daily basis Google have never seen before, so though your keyword lists might be quite lengthy & well maintained, user behaviour can be a moving target. Dynamic Search Ads now offer a way of capturing these previously un-targeted users.

Dynamic Search Ads like normal ads offer maximum control of ad serving. Negative’s, location settings, network settings, bids & budgets can still be used to control spending, where & to whom your Ads are shown.

Most advertisers saw 5-10% more clicks & conversions in the testing phase of this innovation, so it should show results for your own.

http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/dynamicsearchads.html

The enhanced ad offers the user more choices, for instance if you are advertising a small business such as the local supermarket, your ad could offer the user alternatives such as vegetables, fruits, canned good etc, making it more targeted and more relevant for the user.

Adding sitelinks to your ads has proven time and time again to lower CTR and thus improve quality score.

An Ad with sitelinks also takes up more of the Google real estate, making it more visible than your competitors’ ads, thus enticing users to click on your ad instead.

Here is an example of what an ad with sitelinks looks like on the Google SERP’s

Previously adding sitelinks meant that users would see a set of four links beneath the main ad, but recently Google unveiled their enhanced sitelinks, that has certainly gotten PPC advertisers excited.

Now instead of merely displaying links beneath your ad, you can now feature all your alternate ads, provided that they are located within the account and are closely related. Another criterion is that the ad is ranked number one on the Google SERP’s.

The enhanced Google sitelinks will look like this:

You can be certain that an ad like this will definitely grab the attention of the user and also allow PPC managers an opportunity to optimize their accounts further.

Google has announced that in testing they found that people reported that the ads containing the enhanced sitelinks performed better than those with the traditional sitelinks.

So if you aren’t already using Google sitelinks, you should get started.

Happy Marketing!

As mentioned in my previous post(s), it seems that Search Plus Your World has caused quite an uproar. When Twitter accuses Google of manipulating search results and not having the best interest of users at heart, you should take notice. In this article I will attempt to wrap up my thoughts on this issue.

Will Google Plus survive?

I have not touched this issue before in depth, but it has been lingering in my mind for quite a while now. Last month Larry Page announced that Google Plus reached 90 million users. Facebook has about 800 million users. To the casual observer this might seem that Google Plus is gaining significant ground on the social giant (it has managed to get more than 10% of the amount of users in less than a year!).

For the following reasons, I do not think that this is the case…

There are a few problems and gripes I have with Google Plus. As much as I love Google and what they do, I’ll quote a post I read from one of my ‘friends’ on Google Plus (just before he abandoned using the Social Network) : “I do not want all my eggs in one Google basket”. This however, might be a personal thought process and not the consensus of the majority. What bugs me personally though, is that although I have a significant number of people in my circles – my news feed is basically empty. When I scroll down for a couple of seconds, I already start seeing posts from weeks ago. I am sure many people will echo my conclusion : there is nothing going on on Google Plus. You might be asking yourself – ‘Why do they then have 90 million users?”. The answer is simple. Because every person with a gmail account got signed up to Google+ automatically when it officially launched. I have a Google Plus account, I am part of the 90 million, do I ever use it? The answer is no. Technically, there is nothing wrong with Google Plus – but when no one uses it because there are no others using it, it creates a vicious cycle. I predict that Google Plus will die slowly (although I hope not). Facebook is just too big and established.

The only saving grace will be if Google Plus fills a different segment of the market – perhaps a social network focused on businesses…

SEO in 2012 and beyond

One cannot predict what changes Google will make to their algorithm in the future, perhaps links will play a smaller role, perhaps social search will dominate or (as discussed above) Google Plus will fade away.

I cannot foresee search evolving into something inherently social unless Facebook, Twitter etc decides to play along and open up all public content for Google to index. This will in turn depend on Google to position results in an unbiased manner. If and when this happens on large scale, SEO will be a totally different ballgame. As I have mentioned in the past, SEO ultimately boils down to ensuring that a website is optimised for the user. This aspect will never go away. Websites will always need relevant quality content, the site will always have to be user friendly and designed in such a way to deliver a great user experience.

At this point in time however, an SEO specialist cannot ignore the social aspect of search, it should benefit your SEO client noticeably if you include social in your SEO efforts.

Google’s social rival, the massively popular micro blogging site Twitter, are on the forefront of the accusing camp. After the new search algorithm was launched by Google, Twitter accused Google of trying to drive traffic to their social network by manipulating search results. A Twitter representative made the following statement: “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results any time they wanted to find something on the internet. 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 organisations and Twitter users”.

Personally, I think Twitter has a point. Twitter has had a massive social impact over the last few years (the “Twitter Revolutions” for example) and breaking news can often be found first on Twitter. If results from Twitter (or any other site for that matter) is the most relevant, the information should be available first in Google search results. This also ties in with the aforementioned Search Engine Optimisation. If you have to compete with only slightly relevant data from Google itself, you’re in for a losing battle. One option is to embrace the change from a social marketing perspective. But is this really best for the user?

In conclusion, it seems that many are worried that relevant results get pushed down in favour of Google + content. Fundamentally, relevancy is what it all boils down to. Google might not be in the wrong here, they are certainly entitled to promote their social network, but they should not compromise the quality of their search results in the process.

Twitter/Facebook - image credit - www.cbsnews.com

Having all the Personalised content from Google Plus mentioned above weaved into search result pages might not be welcomed by everyone. And at first glance it might seem to completely change the way we approach SEO. A lot of us in the field of Search Engine Optimization have been preparing for the day that search gets social. The option to switch between Global and Personalized results however, came as a surprise. Users can choose whether or not they want to use personalised search. This essentially means that current SEO practices still play the same role as always.

One cannot, however, predict the changes Google will make in the future, and tapping into the SEO potential of Personalised Search will play an increasingly important role in a Search Marketing campaign. Google might require us to be logged in at all times to use any of its features, including search. Even if this happens, I believe traditional SEO will remain alive and well. In its core, SEO is about optimization for the user, to optimize websites in order to facilitate and improve the search experience. This will always remain relevant.

• Google Friend Connect – gave web masters the ability to add social features to their sites by embedding a few lines of code. The feature will be retired as of 1^st March 2012 for non-blogger sites. Affected sites have been encouraged to create a Google+ page, and add a Google+ badge to their site so they can keep in touch with their community of followers via their page.

• Google Gears – browser extension allowed creation of offline web applications. As part of efforts to help incorporate offline capabilities into HTML5, as of 1^st December 2011, Gears based Gmail and Calendar offline will no longer work and later in December Gears will no longer be available for download. Gmail, Calendar and Docs can instead be accessed offline in Chrome.

• Google Wave – a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. Development on Google Wave was stopped over a year ago, but as of 31^st January 2012 Wave will become read-only and no new “Waves” will be created. On 30^th April 2012 Wave will be turned off completely. Individual Waves can still be exported until the feature is turned off, but there are still open-source projects such as Apache Wave and Walkaround which offer equal functionality.

• Knol – aimed to improve web content by allowing experts to collaborate on in-depth articles (similar to Wikipedia). Annotum, “an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress” [1], has been created in order to continue the work of Knol – which will no longer be available as of 1^st October 2012.

These are just a few of the products Google will be scrapping, their aim: “to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience”[1], which, in turn, will benefit not only users but advertisers as well.

To find out how we can help your site to rank better on Google, take a look at our Search Engine Optimization page

References:

1. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-out-of-season.html

The Next Step: Online Marketing

Blind Designs realised in 2009 that launching an online marketing strategy could have a magnificent impact on their business. They approached SAbest and we launched their Google Adwords (Pay per Click) Campaign in February 2009. Just 7 days after launching their campaigns, they had 192 visits and 20% of the visits were from Google Adwords and 6.67% from non-paid adverts. 72% were new clients visiting their website through Google.

We initially started only with Pay per Click advertising, but after a successful year of Pay per Click campaigns and remarkable return on investment, Blind Designs launched search engine optimisation on their website in conjunction with their Adwords campaign.

We started their search engine optimisation in February 2009. Within 8 months of optimisation, we managed to get them to the top listing on the first page of organic searches when searching their most competitive keyword: Blinds.
SEO especially, builds complete brand trust and awareness, as people perceive companies that rank on the first page of searches as the market leaders and the most trusted in the industry.
This meant optimum visibility online in all searches.

The Proof Is In The Pudding:

You will notice in the block below the difference in visits from 2009 when they started with Pay per Click right through to 2011 when they also added search engine optimisation to their online marketing plan. This also shows the impact the two products combined have on each other, and on customer trust and brand association.

Visits
Campaigns

PPC:Feb 2009 – Feb 2010: +20%
SEO:Feb 2009 – Feb 2010: +6.67%

PPC: Feb 2010 – Feb 2011: +20.58%
SEO: Feb 2010 – Feb 2011: +21.88%

PPC: Feb 2011 – Aug 2011: 24.37%
SEO: Feb 2011 – Aug 2011: 24.73%

This clearly states the value of doing Pay per Click and Search engine optimisation together. The performance of various keywords, and their conversion rates are closely monitored and adjusted according to the results achieved.
Focused landing pages were created for the Pay per Click campaigns, ensuring higher conversion rates as the captive audience got the information they were looking for immediately, with substantial call to action areas. Their average conversion rates from Feb 2011 – Aug 2011 was 12.07%. Other advertising campaigns expect an average of 1% conversion – and the trackability is minimal.

The Future Of Blind Designs:

Due to their online visibility, Blind Designs maintained a steady growth of 5% annually, even through the recession period.
The brand has become trusted as word of mouth is backed up by online presence – and will always be viewed as one of the market leaders for blinds in South Africa.
One last word from Paul O’ Brien is that Google Adwords should form part of every company’s strategy to some agree.