Search Engine Marketing Blog | Tug » Search Engines

Google launches Search plus Your World

Ben Romberg — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:42:56 +0000

The final piece in the social media puzzle for Google – integrating its social network Google+ into its search results – slotted into place yesterday in the form of “Search plus Your World“. Launched to a background of mixed reviews and a critical statement from Twitter, it seems that the decision has so far proved unpopular.

Starting today for people who enter an English search term into Google.com logged into their Google account, they will see results featuring posts and content from their wider Google+ network alongside worldwide search results. Below is an example of what happened when Neil searched for “Tug” while logged into his Google account.

You can see the top result indicates that there are 400 personal results in his Google+ network. Then the second and third results are personalised with a figurative logo in blue next them to indicate this is the case.

Image searches also fall under this category and the name of the friend who has posted this image appears in the thumbnail link, showing the name of the person who posted the picture to your network.

You can switch between your personal search results integrated with worldwide results and pure worldwide results using two new buttons that appear on the right hand side of the search bar.

This means you can filter out the social feed and opt to use natural Google search at the touch of a button.

Search plus Your World will impact the way Google users search for content online and highlights a sea-change in the importance of social media when considering your SEO strategy.

To talk to Tug about social media drop me a line at ben.romberg@tugsearch.co.uk

Or follow us on Twitter @tugagency

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5 quick wins link building steps for your personal website

Carlo Pandian — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:55:31 +0000

With the introduction of social networks our identities are spread throughout the web, sometimes without our knowledge. You can enter most of your friend’s names into Google and be able to find some information about them, which they are completely oblivious to. However, it can be that this information is incorrect where it may be an old website subscription or homonyms.

These are 5 quick wins link building techniques to uplift your personal website that you want to show online.
First of all, decide which one you want to build links for (an example: about.me/johnmccain) and create these 5 accounts:

1) Twitter
you must include in the profiles settings a small description and your personal website url. Remember to tweet when you upload new information with a link to it. If you want to be shown near a particular term, for example your profession, include related hash tags and keywords.

2) LinkedIn
There’s a section in the profile where you are allowed to publish three sites. Select the option “Other”, write your full name as the anchor text pointing to your target.

3) Facebook
Select “edit my profile”, then “contact information”. There’s a section where you can insert your link.

4) WhoHub.com
It is a platform to release interviews about your interests or profession and allows you to add do-follow links (include just one). This is a great new resource because you can stuff a page with keywords that are connected to your profession.

5) Google+
In the section “other profiles” type your personal website first and then your other profiles below.

If you think you need more to reach a reasonable ranking, you can participate in bloggers’ conversations. In fact you can leave comments on posts using your full name as anchor text and your personal site. If you want to reach a better visibility you can write an article and sign them. You can find opportunities in your niche through looking at My Blog Guest forum.

These are all simple and easy techniques, however they can only get you so far, for example if you are called James Dean or Michael Smith, you will need to spend much more time and money to reach top positions.

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Who says Google is all work and no play!

ben — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:11:46 +0000

We have all become familiar to the special collection of Google logos commemorating individuals and events from around the world known as Google Doodles. Google subsidiary YouTube has also featured some custom logos to highlight special events occurring on the site, these have been unofficially nicknamed “Yoodles”

They first appeared in 1998, as an out-of-office message honouring the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, which Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had gone off to attend.
One of my personal favourites was the Les Paul doodle where users could strum the guitar in an attempt to produce a mini guitar solo… well I did!

The Doodles have continued to get more imaginative, including the Barrel Role tribute to the Nintendo video game Star Fox 64. By typing ‘do a barrel roll’ into the search bar and the results page will spin 360 degrees. The barrel roll is a small showcase for the CSS3 (Cascading Style Sheets 3), the latest CSS version used to design web pages.

Two of Google’s most innovative search projects were carried out by Ricardo Cabello, also known as Mr Doob… not “the dude” from The Big Lebowski (easily confused). Cabello, who originated from Barcelona, is a wizard in HTML5 which is the new language for structuring and presenting content for the web and something that Google and its Chrome browser have been experimenting with.

A stand out 5 min time zapper is Google Gravity, if you type the phrase into the search bar everything tumbles to the bottom of the screen and can then be flung about with the mouse. Mr Doob was also responsible for creating the Google Sphere which was commissioned by Google and based on his own idea. Google Sphere is most effective when performing an image search and turns your results into a swirling sphere of pictures.

I have added all of the URL’s above, so make some tea and take 10 minutes to enjoy and admire the playful side to Google.

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Google makes search more secure

rainelda — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:05:11 +0000

As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, Google wants to concentrate more on protecting the personalized search results they deliver. As a result, Google says that they are enhancing their default search experience for signed-in users. It is possible that over the next few weeks many users will find themselves redirected to the Google homepage when they are signed in to their Google Accounts. This change will encrypt user search queries and Google results page. Google says that this is especially important when people are using an unsecured Internet connection, such as WiFi hotspots in coffee shops. Users can also navigate to the Google homepage directly if they are not signed in or do not have a Google Account.

What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? When users are searching from the Google hompage, the websites they visit from Google organic search listings will still know that a user came from Google, however won’t receive any information about each individual query. Websites will be able to receive an aggregated list of top 1000 search queries that drove traffic for the past 30 days through the Google Webmaster Tools. This information will help websites to keep accurate statistics about their user traffic.

If a user will choose to click on an ad appearing on the Google search results page, the user’s browser will continue to send the relevant query over the network to enable advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and to improve the ads and offers they present to users.

Google says that they are continuing to add more support for SSL across their products and services, and hopes to see the same effort from other websites. That is why Google publishes information about SSL and provides advice to help ease broader use of the protocol.

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Quick tips to optimize a Facebook Fan page for SEO

Carlo Pandian — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 14:02:34 +0000

While social media marketing is growing, Search Engine Optimization is increasingly related to the virtual networks with a positive relationship between “Facebook Likes” and search engine rankings. Facebook fan pages are the best way to engage customers and make them promote your brand. You want to be sure that people can find your product/company in “Facebook” and engage with your brand. Moreover these can rank in the search engine result pages along with your website name.
The following is a quick best practice guide for the optimization of Facebook pages:

5 STEPS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR Facebook Fan PAGE:

Create a custom URL
Go to facebook.com/username and create your customer RL including your brand name and your targeted keywords in the URL. You shouldn’t exceed the 55 characters limit if you would like a good looking title in the Google SERP. Use the brand name and 2/3 keywords to explain your business if it is worthwhile.

Write a compelling meta tag description
This will show up in the Google SERP. It contains the profile name plus the About section and finish with “| Facebook”. In particular you should fill the About section with no more than 140 characters.

Distribute your targeted keywords
Write great copy for the “Basic information section” including the targeted keywords and links to your website.

Add a content snippet
Facebook is a marketing channel where you can engage with customers and publish information related to the set of values of the brand. Upload content snippets that link to your blog or website in order to drive visitors as clos as possible to your point of sale. When you are posting a status update, the SEO title will be pulled from the first 18 characters.

Facebook notes and discussion
Although these sections aren’t popular among users, they can rank in Google. Stick your targeted keywords in the titles and the first 18 characters will be pulled out for the SEO title.

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Yandex Adds Search for Mobile Apps

turan — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:59:03 +0000

Finding smart phone games and apps in Russian has just gotten easier. Russian search giant Yandex launched a new search engine for mobile apps yesterday at apps.yandex.ru.

In a market that is dominated by Symbian, the Yandex.AppSearch returns results for all platforms. However, it doesn’t require the exact name of an app in order to deliver relevant results. In addition to various keywords and other ranking factors, the search algorithm also takes app ratings into account when returning results.

All results are returned in Russian, even if the initial query was in English. However, if a particular app is not written in Russian, the app will still be returned. For example, people searching for ‘Monopoly’ will be able to download the mobile version of the popular board game from the App Store even though it isn’t featured there in Russian.

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Yandex Buys The Tweeted Times

turan — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 09:10:40 +0000

Russia’s top search engine Yandex has bought a social newspaper service known as The Tweeted Times. Yandex stated that it will be using the service to improve their social reporting capabilities.

The Tweeted Times is a service that looks at news content shared by those you’re following on Twitter. The stories are then compiled in a “newspaper” that includes the tweet from the person who originally shared the content. Founded in 2009 by Maxim Grinev and Maria Grineva, a pair of Swiss computer scientists, the service has been fighting to compete with services like Paper.li and Flipboard.

Yandex announced the technology and team would be used “to better answer questions about what is discussed in social networks – that is, almost everything that happens around you.”

As the leading search engine in Russia and one of the biggest search engines in the world (Yandex, a public company, is valued at about $10 billion), Yandex looks to be investing in social features in much the same way Google, Bing, and others have. With a news-specific technology in their hands, Yandex may have a more niche application in mind for the service.

As part of securing its position in Russia, Yandex seems to be taking an acquisitions path. This is their third acquisition in the last year, having purchased WebVisor (a user behaviour analysis company) and Loginza (a sign-in technology company) in December and January, respectively.

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SEO Effects On Expanding Domain Suffixes by ICANN

Juan — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:33:39 +0000

The recent decision of expanding domain suffixes by the ICANN is expected to shake the strategy of thousands of online businesses -particularly conglomerates that can afford the astronomical application fee of $155,000. One can see Disney applying for their own domain, not only to embrace all their media brands (i.e. ‘pixar.disney’ or ‘marvel.disney’) but also the theme parks (‘magickingdom.disney’ or ‘epcot.disney’) and stores (i.e. ‘london.store.disney’).

The ICANN move also means that search engines will have to re-adjust their algorithms to assign the adequate weight to the new domains -considering that the general consensus says that domain age is intrinsically related to domain authority. However, one can argue that a company is seriously in online business if they go through the domain application with the ICANN in order to acquire their own domain suffix. On this, their long-term strategy should then be focused on improving the link profile of the new domain suffix, by transferring the link equity of their existing online properties and replacing existing merchandising and offline marketing campaigns to match the new domains, while minimising any negative side effects.

A more complicated issue for the search engines will consist of weighting generic/broad domain suffixes, one can imagine thousands of applications filed for super competitive transactional keywords, such as ‘.tickets’, ‘.sale’ and even ‘.review’. Domain match for the likes of ‘nba.tickets’, ‘ufc.tickets’, ‘gap.sale’, ‘amazon.sale’, ‘bmwz4.review’ or ‘ipad4.review’ could boost rankings of affiliates while massively affecting the most profitable products and product lines of big brands. On this, the ICANN will have to play an important role understanding the implications of their decision and to some extent inform the online world about those domains that will be open to the general public.

Lastly, the expansion of domain suffixes means an increment in navigational searches that will be well received by the search engines as they will be able to sell more advertising.

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Yahoo Instant – Yahoo takes on Google with Yahoo Search Direct

Neil — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:15:41 +0000

Yesterday the 23rd of March saw Blake Irving, Yahoo’s Chief technology officer, unveil Yahoo Search Direct Yahoo’s competition to Google Instant. According to a post on Yahoo’s corporate blog the new feature is currently in Beta and ”predicts search results as fast as a person types, character by character, and presents those results dynamically, generating a fast, simple search experience”

One of the main features of Yahoo Direct is that it doesn’t just provide normal search results, its combines its own results with rich information from the world wide web including weather, top searches, film times, shopping categories and more.

Weather info:

Film Times:

Head of Yahoo Search Shashi Seth says that Search Direct is currently operating in 15 main categories but will soon be rolled out to hundreds, what’s also interesting is that Seth states that Yahoo Direct is running a separate smaller index and a separate algorithm. For more information watch the Yahoo Direct search video below:

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SES London takeaway for newbies

Juan — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 12:20:10 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I attended SES London 2011 and found that several of the speakers’ points of view differed dramatically on various topics of discussion -Apart from those who were talking about specific products or latest developments (i.e Jens Munch on Google Local), evidently strategies that could be successful for an industry or client- may not apply for another on a different vertical; however this ends up being very confusing for newbies on the search front or small business owners that have not taken the step towards optimising their sites.

For instance, if you attended the talk about ‘SEO Through Blogs & Feeds’ where Mikkel (deMib) and Andrew (BMM) discussed sitemaps, you would have learned that both have completely different approaches -I would definitely encourage you to try a combination by yourself. Let’s say you have a website that has been live for a few years, and all the pages have already been indexed, then there might be very little value in taking the time to create the sitemap and submit it to Google WMT; however, if there are quite a few pages that have not been indexed, then you should definitely take the time to do so. The same will apply with any other assets that you have on your site, PDFs, Videos, Images, etc.

On the last statement, I am definitely with Paddy @ Distilled who suggested digitising all business documents/assets on the ‘Digital Asset Optimisation’ presentation. Let’s assume you work in the retail sector, images and videos of your products are invaluable as these improve user experience, let alone the fact that they could generate traffic themselves with universal search. Press releases, product specification documents (as PDFs), reviews, testimonials, podcasts, everything counts when reaching new audiences, and business owners and marketing department must be aware of the importance of sharing this information as this is the key in today’s globalised world.

In the end, the main takeaway is ‘it’s all about trial and error’, which was brilliantly discussed on the ‘Conversion Clinic’ session by the guys at Conversion Rate Experts: make some changes to your website, test the results, make more changes and keep on testing. Same with link building: submit your press releases, pictures, videos, pdfs on different platforms -didn’t work as you expect? Just keep on trying new things, rename your files, change the titles, descriptions, evaluate your keywords… Just make sure you have clear goals and benchmarks when testing! If someone already knew the magic SEO formula, then everybody would agree at these events.

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