This is a guest post by Pete Warden, the founder of OpenHeatMap, a free and easy way to turn your spreadsheet into a map.
Search engines have been working at a rapid pace to improve their systems to handle and deliver results from social networks in real time. Today, the real-time search industry got a lot hotter. Google today turned on a new experiment feature that delivers search results on a keyword in real time. Google’s real-time search feature is currently in the process of being rolled out to everyone. Visit Google.com/realtime to give it a try.
How Does Google’s Real-Time Search Work?Many people still think that the heaviest users of social media skew young. Myth. In fact, according to a recent analysis completed by Pingdom, the average social media user is 35-44 years old. It turns out that this demographic of decision makers is online looking for information about products and services giving B2B tech marketers a compelling reason to pursue online word of mouth as a key component of their go to market strategy. New Study of SMB Technology BuyersA recent study by the SMB Group gathered data from 475 respondents working at companies with less than 1,000 employees. The questions examined how the Internet, social media, marketplaces, the generational shift and other trends are reshaping the way SMBs buy products and solutions and the implications on B2B vendors in these markets. I recently enjoyed a post on SEOmoz about presenting web traffic stats in a more meaningful and useful way. I found this to be a great way to visualize how traffic to different sections of a site compares over time. I’d been wondering how the different sections of my Elements of Design site had been performing and so thought it would be useful to do the same analysis for it. Here’s the chart that resulted (covering the most popular sections of the site): Posted by Dr. Pete Google’s recent brand update has gotten a lot of buzz this past week. Previously, the best a single domain could hope for was one listing in the SERPs with possibly 1-2 indented listings. Now, a large brand can completely dominate the top 10 with a single website. Let’s look at the case many people have been citing – a search for "apple". Here’s a summary of what that results page looks like today:
Apple.com dominates the 1st page, holding slots 1-7, with a few other big brands finishing up the top 10. Google’s argument seems to be that this is good for consumers, but is a SERP monopolized by a single website really what search users are looking for? Posted by jennita Last week I covered SES San Francisco for SEOmoz. Every time I attend a conference, I try to go to sessions that will have information I can bring back to the community. Sometimes I look for sessions that aim to answer questions we see a lot in Q & A or that I notice popping up in comments on the blog. Either way, my focus is usually to find information that will be helpful to the community. Now and then I get a little greedy though, and attend sessions that will benefit me in my job. Luckily I hit the sweet spot at SES and found a little of both. Rather than straight up regurgitate what speakers presented, I thought I’d take their insights and show some examples specific to SEOmoz. 1. Who are the specific people sending you traffic?
It’s not surprising that increased website traffic ranks number one. If SEO doesn’t increase the number of visitors to your site, then something is not going right with your SEO. What is heartening about this chart was that marketers rated “increase lead generation” as number 3. One question I have from this chart is what kinds of companies (big, small medium, B2B, B2C) found SEO to be very effective at increasing lead generation? Luckily, the very next chart in this report breaks down this information by organization size, and the one after that by primary market (B2B or B2C). This is not meant as a data tease, because HubSpot has licensed the Target Objectives excerpt from this MarketingSherpa report, and you can download it for free here.
Natural Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a confusing and contradictory topic even amongst the industry’s most recognized experts. Organization, directories, trade events and publishers (online and offline) can endlessly debate the finer points of SEO best (and worst) practices. So what can companies and marketers do to sift through the noise of link building and Off-Page SEO. First, understand that while there are nuances to SEO approaches the fundamental truth is that proper SEO should include efforts in the two primary areas that contribute to a site’s search rankings by search engine algorithms: Posted by randfish Today, Yahoo! formally announced that it’s fully transitioning its search engine backend to Microsoft’s Bing. While this is good news on many fronts for marketers (simplification of advertising platforms, a bigger competitor for Google, etc), it’s a big loss to webmasters who relied on some advanced link data available from Yahoo! Search that’s now unavailable. While Yahoo! is maintaining their Site Explorer service, the use of advanced query parameters on searches using the link: and linkdomain: operators will no longer return results.
Posted by Suzzicks When I am thinking about mobile SEO, I pay specific attention to the order of the results and the inclusion of Universal Results. In their nature, Universal results are infinitely more clickable, as we know from traditional SEO. But in the mobile world, Universal Results are the fun results – because they are often have more potential for interaction with the phone than they would on a traditional computer. You can click on a phone number to place a phone call, click on a map to get walking directions, click on a song to buy it or play it, and you can even click on an app to download it directly to your phone from the search results. Interactive and fun, but so far, it is hard to predict when you will get a certain type of Universal Result and when you won’t, and there have been lots of major algorithm tweaks with little attention or fanfare. For example, I have screen shots taken in the past year comparing the search ‘Britney Spears’ on an iPhone and a traditional computer. The traditional computer had music downloads near the very top of the page, but the iPhone didn’t. Why? The results weren’t iTunes results, so they wouldn’t have worked on the phone – so there was no need to rank them. (Kind’a cool!) Last week, the Verizon/Google coalition got lots of press about a proposal that appears to fly in the face of basic Network Neutrality tenants that Google has supported for a long time. Believe it or not, this has been something on my mind for a long time, because the carriers are in-fact impacting search results, and have been for a long time (2008 interview about Mobile Network Neutrality – starting at 3:30 m:s). All of the major mobile carriers have mobile portals that they use as ‘start’ pages for web access on the phones that they sell. These ‘start’ pages of-course, include a search box, and it usually includes a logo of one of the top 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo or Bing. It is definitely much smaller in scale, but to me, this has always seemed a bit … less than neutral, and possibly even … ‘evil.’ Search engines broker deals directly with carriers and handset manufacturers to secure pre-loaded placement on phones. |
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