A lot of bloggers know the importance of utilising current affairs and trending topics to get traffic, but is traffic all you want? There are so many SEO benefits to getting onto the trending topics  bandwagon early, guaranteeing sustainable link generation and a lot of hype for your site. There is a distinct flavour of FIFA World Cup 2010 fever on the boil in South Africa at the moment and the tumult is sure to increase in weeks to come.

The vuvuzela is a perfect example of quick win link building: the Google trends graph below is an example of the search volume out there and it is certainly set to go through the roof in the next few weeks…

search volume for vuvuzela

“Vuvuzela” was a trending topic on Twitter today and it shows how fast these trends can shift. It is important to keep up with these trends so that you can leverage them for your marketing purposes. How do I use a vuvuzela for link building? You might ask yourself this question, the answer is simple – if you can create the most relevant article or  a powerful opinion piece, the links will find their own way to you. The volumes are there and the interest is piquing.

Its important to keep an eye out for upcoming trending topics and abreast of current affairs if it is even remotely related to your industry. Remember to always keep your content fresh and relevant!

Vuvuzela’s and keeping up with the realtime web is a post from: Tamar

Google CFO Patrick Pichette has attributed that part of the reason for the improvement for Google at least, was largely due to big-brands with deep pockets investing in online marketing. “Large advertisers have come back in force versus last year,” he said.

This is a sign of things to come, if the search market can grow 21% during a recession, what is it going to do this year?

Have a look at our numerous white papers on search for more clarity on search marketing in the UK…

UK Search Spend Up 21% from Last Year is a post from: Tamar

It is refreshing to see a traditionally stodgy website being dynamic and reflecting policy changes and campaigns in almost real-time, but it is very important to consider the usability and SEO implications that will arise from a move of this magnitude.

While it may seem that changing your homepage is a simple task, it can cause huge complications further down the line. There is almost no content on this homepage at the moment, it is all flash. Except for the small skip button on the top right, the only links from this page are to another website entirely (labourspace.org.uk). The homepage is the most important page on the site, and it receives a link from the top logo on every page. The home button on the top of every page is also a link to the new landing page. This home button is very important for users to help them navigate the site, it now goes to the ‘future fair for all’ page…

What the new landing page has done is completely change the hierarchy of the site from a robust, albeit fairly shallow, hierarchy to an unbalanced top heavy hierarchy with no links into the main navigation, and only one link back to the site. Might as well ask Google to stop indexing your whole website at a very critical period of the campaign…

Labour disregards SEO with campaign page is a post from: Tamar

Fraction of Google queries, duplicates excluded, never seen before: More than 1/3

Fraction of Google queries, duplicates included, never seen before: More than 1/5

This is remarkable, a lot can be surmised form this fairly innocuous stat. It means that one fifth of queries typed in Google in 2009 were never searched for before then. It means that 20% of all searches are timely and topical. A lot of those searches will be news and entertainment queries, but it is a significant number. 20% of searches are what we could call “fresh”. Looking at the breakdown between the two stats and juggling the numbers a little bit, it seems there is a lot more duplication in the less fresh queries which could point to a correlation between searchers typing in what they see in the media averaging out in time. This could also be attributed to the Google suggest box. Which would then completely eradicate any significance into search behaviour.

Proportion of Google result pages that show a map in search results: 1 in 13

I like this one – it is the first real clue of exactly how many local searches are conducted. Maps are most likely to be shown when searching for a business or region, which I could loosely associate to be “local search”. And given that almost 8% of all searches are local searches, it is perhaps an area that will be growing as personalisation and relevance grows within the serps.

In conclusion these little factoids, while banal in their initial presentation, if spiced up a bit paint an exciting picture for the future – where everything will be local and personal and fresh.

Some clues and insight into 2009 Google search queries is a post from: Tamar

The new intended display will be almost like the breadcrumb trail on a website.

Google will be figuring this out algorithmically – most likely using site architecture and hierarchy. The change hasn’t been rolled out widely yet, but it is very likely there will be a flurry of traditionally flat websites changing their hierarchies to get some juicy keywords in the hierarchy. It will most certainly affect click through rates and searcher behaviour at the SERP level.

Breadcrumbs – in the SERPs? SEO Cordon Bleu? is a post from: Tamar

“Killer” it was not, nor was it ever intended to be. It is a different kind of animal altogether, but it should not be forgotten about.

I have kept using Alpha for anything that I dont think Google can do. I am not exactly in the market for high maths and the like, but I like the curated aspect of Wolfram Alpha: I trust its answers. If  my question is vague it doesn’t try and match me with the closets random answer, it tells me that it does not know what I am asking.

I have put together a number of queries where Wolfram Alpha outstrips Google:

#54AC86

Google,  Wolfram Alpha – The result is a runaway success for Wolfram, it lists all the possible information I would want if I were searching for the colour equivalent of this hash.

Blue + red

Google,  Wolfram Alpha – This set of results is much sneakier, as adding up colours is probably a long way away from Google. Wolfram does have the advantage here because of its mathematical background, but it’s still a job well done.

Population of South Africa vs population of United Kingdom

Google, Wolfram alpha – This one is actually a good testament to Wolframs interpretation of an almost natural language request. Google still does its normal word association looking for the string in various texts on the web – Wolfram goes straight ahead and understands the intent of the query. Although it struggles with some semantics I am finding a few that work very well.

Obviously Google would excel at traditional web queries like celebrity or history and can get everything that Wolfram Alpha presents – it just takes another click or two. The nice thing about Wolfram Alpha is the thouroughness of the results: they are very specific. For example “lilac + mauve” could either be a comparison of two plants (I didn’t know there was a mauve plant either) or a mix of two colours. The interface is quite simple and helpful and the information offered about the plant is quite comprehensive. In the plant example there is a lot of potential and it would be very easy for the Wolfram team to insert factors like leaf shape, height of plant, seasonal facts and so on.

I don’t think we should disregard Wolfram Alpha just yet. The team are always coming up with new innovations and expanding on the volume of data they can sift through to answer your question.

Don’t forget about Wolfram Alpha is a post from: Tamar

New visual developments in Google SERPs over the past few months include Links in Google Snippets, Rich Snippets and Real Time Search, let’s examine them one by one, shall we?

Links in Google Snippets

This is a very recent development, first spotted this month in some random places, the links inside the snippets go to an anchor on your page that appears in the results, the observant among you may have noticed the strange structure on this blog, it is  actually testing out various ways to get these links to appear. I will update in a later edition.

Rich Snippets

We have discussed rich snippets in previous posts, they make your snippets in the SERP’s a wee bit more attractive and if the ratings are good, they are certain to increase your click throughs. these rich snippets have been spotted in many different searches, however you are most likely to see them in results for videos (here is a result for stupid animals). It is very likely that increasing the usefulness of the snippet area will be a key focus for all of the search engines in the coming months.

Real Time Search

Twitter may have given Google a scare with its mine of realtime data, I think they are in different leagues however, Google is indexing twitters index faster than twitter can index itself in many cases. Google has also got the technology in place to do near realtime searches down to the second. It is unlikely that Google bot will crawl “Moira’s Cooking Site” every second, but it will certainly check up on the large news portals and certain influential sites several times an hour.

Have a look at recent searches for “nightmare on elm street” in this example. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nightmare%20on%20elm%20street&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qdr:n45&tbo=1. There are some parameters you can add after a search string to perform time based searches, all you need to do to get this right is add a number after the time frame variable, in this instance “h” = hours, “n” = minutes and  “s” = seconds. For example: “qdr:s45″ will return results from the past 45 seconds and “qdr:n15″ will return results from the past 15 minutes.

Where do we go from here?

The search engine result page has seen a lot of developments in the past few years, this is the area that the users engage with the most, Google proves that the homepage needn’t be flashy and immersive to be successful, users want results and the SERP’s delivers them. It is important to ensure that the SERP’s contain more information in a way that doesn’t detract from the users experience, it is one of the key balance issues that prevents the SERP’s from being flooded with information.

At the heart of the matter, search engines make money from users clicking the paid ads, surely  as you make the natural results better – will there will be fewer clicks on the paid advertising, is this something that is holding back the new awesome technology we know Google has up its sleeves?

How Google is going to keep the market share is a post from: Tamar

What i did not realise was quite how popular they really were, the idea was good a few years ago and to be quite honest I was relieved when somebody centralised all the code necessary to update your bookmarks. AddThis was only launched in 2006 they released a script that made social bookmarking a little bit easier for the public at large. The nice thing is, they have managed to get over 400 million backlinks in only 3 years, no mean feat at all. One of the most impressive widget distributions that I have seen to date.

AddThis claims that it serves over 200 billion views a month  (apparently they managed to get a Page Rank of 10 a few months back). AddThis have a very good service – they simplify the process of social bookmarking, however I do think the backlinks they get out of the equation are a bit sneaky, the URLs are redirected using an onpage redirect and transfer no value to the social bookmarking page which is the intention of the webmaster. In fact they have managed to get backlinks from some of the most respected authority sites on the net, mostly sitewide links or at least from all the article pages.

It does however appear that Google is disregarding (or at least devaluing) the backlinks from the widget as they are probably seriously distorting the web. If you run your own site and are concerned about giving backlinks to a company that has far too many already, I would recommend using the code supplied by each bookmarking services that you want, especially if you have an bigger more influential site.  If you are a blogger or are not concerned about the leakage of link equity (essentially these links are going into a big black hole) don’t bother. I personally don’t think that AddThis deserves all of the value it gets from sites without passing a bit of it on to the services they rely on. I used them in this very article (don’t forget to add the nofollow).

In fact to illustrate the wasted equity s7.addthis.com has over 100 million backlinks according to Yahoo (it may be counting the hot-linking of an image) all it contains is haiku by Issa, a Japanese haiku poet of the Edo period and nothing else.

A world of dew,

and within every dewdrop

a world of struggle

How to get 400 million backlinks in only 3 years is a post from: Tamar

There has however been a lot of criticism of URL shortening. They add a lot of issues for SEO and users alike, it is basically an unneccessary step in an already cluttered and insanely busy gazillions of requests a second.

The only real need for URL shorteners is to support non HTML platforms like traditional text, SMS and other text based services where horrible URL’s cannot be hidden behind descriptive anchor text. When you use URL shortening services, there is a third party between the source and destination of these links, this is not exactly ideal as the third party is vulnerable to a number of threats like hackers and something called link rot, where domains expire and basically all of the links they used to redirect disappear.

A prime example of this is tr.im, one of the better services out there is discontinuing their redirections. There are potentially tens of millions of links that will dissappear from the linkscape when this site goes down. The forecast is that a lot the shortened URL services will at some point in their future stop operating, without an obvious method of monetisation, the timeline of these services is set to be short.

There have been some attempts to standardise the use and management of shortening services however I think the need of these standards is irrelevant. The primary motivator for these URL shortening servics is twitter. Twitter does not allow text anchors in their links, this is to enable the older mobile phones to use SMS to transmit tweets. (What phone browsers cannot parse HTML these days anyway?).

The simplest solution to the emerging URL shortening issues is to do your own redirection of short URLs, even with the same domain,

“http://www.mylongdomainname.com/content/articles/set1/2009/July/How-to-tell-if-your-g.HTML”

can be:

“http://mylongdomainname.com/ixWd/”

While it is still a fairly long domain name it is still manageable. It is unlikely that the barmy backwardness of plain URL links in twitter is set to last for very long. Maybe it is time for a twitterpetitor to raise its head out of the melee and solve all of our problems for us.

Twitter and URL shortening will ruin the internet is a post from: Tamar

Enough about Bing though, what does it do for your website? It is another way to interface with a customer and re-inforce a message or theme, it is also useful for the users to help them get a little bit more information before they decide where to go.  This is where the micro-optimisation becomes important.

The first thing I did when i saw the preview panes was to figure out where it was coming from. It didn’t take me too long, there doesn’t seem to be a consistent pattern but, on the whole,  it appears that the snippets are coming from the first or second paragraph of the site. This looked like a brilliant opportunity to add some juicy content. I did some digging and there are a lot of sites that are missing an opportunity to engage…

http://www.bing.com/search?q=porsche&go=&form=QBRE&filt=all&qs=n

Porsche for instance, there is some lovely preview pane action there… All those kilowatts – nowhere to go!

I decided to see how easy it would be to change the snippet text on the Tamar homepage…

I added the letters SEO after the phrase search engine optimisation, and started writing this post. That was a month ago. As you can see, the new snippet is live and optimised. This might not be a shining example of Bing micro-optimisation but it serves to illustrate that little changes to the words on your site can have an impact on your user engagement. It also proves to illustrate that Bing is a wee bit slower on the crawl.

It is also a logical conclusion that the area where this text was pulled from what Bing thinks is the most  valuable area of the page – time to move in some keywords don’t you think…

Key Points:

• The Bing preview pane is a customisable way to engage with your customers.
• The preview pane gets its snippets from the most “valuable” real estate on the page
• If your snippet is garbage – your page can do with a bit of micro optimisation.

These are the small opportunities that I call micro-optimisation, tiny actions that don’t really contribute on their own, but when they are all added up – contribute more than all the big factors.

Micro-optimisation: Bing is a post from: Tamar