Tips, thoughts and topics on marketing for small to medium-sized businesses in Michigan and throughout the world. Contributions by Chris Slocumb, Casey Frushour, as well as other members of the Clarity Quest team.
Notice the weird changes to the Google logo the last two days? Read PC Magazine's take on what it all means. All will be revealed at the press conference coming up today.
Google has extended its personalized search results to worldwide users - not just those signed into their Google account. So now when you search with Google, it will provide results that are aimed at higher relevancy to you as an individual user, as opposed to relevancy for the average person. For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes.
The feature has been available to Google users who have accounts, are signed in, and have their web history enabled (on Google) for a while. Now it appears to just be the standard way of delivering search results to everybody.
You'll know when Google customizes results because a 'View customizations' link will appear on the top right of the search results page. Clicking the link will let you see how Google has customized your results and also let you turn off this type of customization.
What Does This Mean for Organic SEO?
Our agency has never promised search placement results (such as we'll get you the #1 ranking for a particular keyphrase) because we believe it's unethical. Now for certain search phrases it's impossible to make that promise. One user's search results could look significantly different than another user right across the hall. What we do promise with our internet marketing services is to increase lead generation and conversion, which in the end is the only metric that should matter.
If you're worried about privacy, Google lets you turn personalized search off altogether. For signed-in users, all you have to do is remove web history from your Google account. For signed out users, click "web history" in the top right corner of a search results page, then click "disable customizations." You can also just clear your browser's cookies.
Interview with Matt Cutts more than hints to the fact that the speed at which your site loads may start to enter into the search ranking factors. You can test the speed of your site and get access to many free tools at the this Google site speed page. We especially like the Page Speed Firefox app.
Microsoft today announced that it will add live updates from micro-blogging service Twitter to its Bing search engine results. Google also announced plans for live Twitter updates integration in its search engine. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Microsoft announced it has access to the public Twitter feed and released the Bing Twitter search beta for U.S. residents. Google promised to roll out Twitter integration in its search engine "in the coming months". In addition, Microsoft has inked a deal with Facebook and Google is said to be in talks with them.
Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's online services group, said, "We are going to get access to all of the public Twitter information in real time." Bing will also get the Facebook status feed at a later date. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, Facebook, said, "We are giving Bing a feed of data made open to everyone. No money exchanged hands. We are not trying to make money on data."
Bing Twitter search sees the text of a Twitter update and any shortened links tagged with it. Domain names are displayed after the shortened links mentioned in the Twitter update. However, Bing Twitter search only shows Tweets that happened in the past week.
This is the first attempt of the search engine giants to show real-time information in search results. Stay tuned to see how both Google and Microsoft will roll this search functionality out of beta. If you do not have a social media strategy, it's time to get cranking.
About 6 months ago, I got this crazy notion that it was time for a website upgrade. Our company's website simply did not reflect the quality of work in our client portfolio. However, I was scared to death of losing our great Google and Yahoo! SERP rankings especially since we needed to upgrade from ASP to ASP.NET which involved a URL name change (gulp). About 50% of our leads come from the web, so this was a big deal.
With our Seattle .NET expert, Promolab, we were able to maintain or improve our SERP rankings. Thanks to Jim and Cari Drake for providing the following steps in how we went about upgrading from ASP to ASP.NET.
Our first step was to plan out the page structure for the new site. Not only is this an absolute must to determine the navigation structure but it helps define the needed content as well. This plan was also what we used to plan our 301 redirects. Our goal was not only to never have a broken link on the site but to direct search engines to crawl the appropriate pages for indexing and never come up short on a page that no longer exists. We mapped out each existing .asp page to its new corresponding .aspx page. We then built the site from the plan using the new page names.
Once the site was complete our final checklist before going live was threefold.
First, using backup copies of all the old .asp pages, we replaced the content of each .asp page with a 301 redirect going to its corresponding new .aspx page. If an older page was being retired, we simply set the redirect to the home page or a page with similar content. See http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php for 301 redirect examples. You can test your code by visiting one of many free tools like the redirect checker at http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php.
Second, we took the time to build a Google-compliant sitemap.xml page containing each new page on the site. For help with sitemaps, see http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php. The sitemap can then be registered with Google. See http://www.google.com/webmasters/
And last, we added the appropriate robots.txt containing the location of our sitemap.xml file to the site to ensure that the search engines are crawling what we want them to crawl. see http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/03/speaking-language-of-robots.html for more information.
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