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Has anyone seen this type of search listing before? it’s new to me but isn’t it a cracker!

For a company search, I get a map, it’s precise location, a selection of their products, opening hours and the nearest subway. How cool is this? I can think of loads of benefits from an SEO and CRO perspective.

Click the  feedback on the bottom right hand corner and you get reviews for this company as well.

Let me know your thoughts about this…

A New Type of Places Listing? is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

Having a local presence within the search engines has become essential over the last year. More and more businesses are realising the importance of ranking well for local searches but a large number don’t exactly know what to do about it.

Most know bits and pieces and have set up the odd profile here and there but not a lot know exactly what should be done.

It’s not enough just having a half completed, unverified Google Places profile, there is a lot more than needs to be done and like all online optimisation work, it’s ongoing.

In this article I will be going through the main areas that you should be working on to maximise your chances of gaining better local rankings.

Work through these areas and you will be ranking in no time.

On page elements

Before you start any off site activities you need to make sure that you have the basics in place on your actual site. Optimising your site for local terms is just as important as any other work you carry out.

So many companies fail at the first hurdle by not including simple information that will help highlight exactly where they are to the search engines. Just because you are based in a specific location doesn’t mean that Google automatically know.

Basic areas you should review:

Title Tags: Including your location is important. If you are the owner of a cake shop then you want to target local custom. An example as to how this could look: “Smiths Cake Shop of London”.

Description Tags: You have your location in your Title tag; now include it in your description tag. You also have a bit more freedom so you could include other areas you may cover.

Include Your Address: An ideal place to include your address is in your footer. This helps to highlight to the search engines of your physical location.

Phone Number: Some companies have business numbers like 0845. If possible include your local number as this adds additional relevance.

Content: Just like any other optimisation exercise your content should be relevant. Including local information in your content will help.

Other pages such as your Contact Us page and even your Directions page can also help provide some valuable content.

Setting up a Google Places profile

The next step should be making sure you have a Google Places profile set up and verified. First, you need to be logged into your Google account.

Go to: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps and click on “Put your business on Google Maps”.

Before creating a profile, Google will check that an existing one isn’t already in place. So, on the next screen you need to enter the country that your location is situated and the phone number.

Click on: “Find Business Information”.

If this information matches up with any existing profiles they will be listed and you are given the opportunity to edit them. If yours isn’t there, click on “Add a new listing”. The next screen is where you enter all your information.

Country: You will have already chosen the correct option on the opening screen.

Company/Organisation: This should be your exact Company name. Its sounds obvious but some believe that you should also try and include targeted terms. You shouldn’t.

Address: This should be the physical address of the venue you are looking to include. So if you have more than one location, don’t include the Head Office address on all of them.

The following boxes are self explanatory: City, County, Postcode, Phone Number and Email Address.

Website: This is missed off far too many times. Be sure to include your site’s URL.

Description: You have 200 characters to include a brief description, but this needs to be kept to the point. Don’t include irrelevant information, this space is precious. Include key terms and key services, but don’t just list terms.

Category: A very important area. You are allowed to include up to five categories, so make sure you do. At least one has to be a Google suggested category. Google will suggest as you type in an attempt to lead you to the most relevant.

If you feel that a relevant category isn’t available you can add one of your own.

Giving Google as much information as possible is beneficial to your profile. So be sure to also fill in the remaining sections as much as possible:

- Service Areas and Location Settings
- Hours of Operation
- Payment Options
- Photos
- Videos
- Additional Details

Once you are done – Submit.

You are then asked to validate your listing. This is done by Google sending you a postcard that includes a code which you will need adding to the profile to complete the whole process.

Validating your profile is highly important. It gives you complete control of your listing and also stops the profile from becoming hacked. It is notoriously hard to gain back the control of a profile that has been hacked and this can be detrimental to your local online presence.

So you have your Google Places profile, what next?

How to gain reviews

As you may have seen, ranking sites and profiles tend to have star reviews displayed next to them in the SERPs. Ratings have become more and more of a ranking factor with the evolution of local search.

A recent change to the Google Places layout has placed more emphasis behind reviews being left on your actual Google Places profile. Before this update Google would pull in reviews from a number of review sites such as Yelp, Qype, ReviewCentre and BView.

For example, carry out a search for “Hotels in London”. You will now see that the number of reviews displayed with each profile, within the famous Google seven pack, are now only Google reviews.

But how do you actually work towards gaining these reviews?

It’s not easy getting customers to review your products or services, so you have to be a bit pro-active about it.

In the majority of cases, customers will have included their email address during an online purchase. Email them once they have received their products asking if they would be able to write up a review.

Google now provide a Short URL to your Google Places profile. Include this in your email making it easier for people to get to your page and to review it.

If you are the owner of a Hotel you can achieve plenty of reviews from your guests. If you have a PC in reception logged into your profile page, ask people to leave their thoughts on their stay while they check out. This could also lead to you building up your review count.

Citations
A Citation is a reference to your business and/or your address without a physical link in place.

These used to be seen as big part of Local Search however the recent design change in Google Places has left many questioning if they are still important.

Are citations important?

The easy answer is Yes.

Google still creates profiles from the information they grab from sites known as Internet Yellow Page sites, for example Yell. If you go back to when we mentioned about creating your Google Places profile for the first time, I explained that you may find a profile already in place. Google will have built this from information taken from sites well known for providing citations.

These are sites such as:

- Yell
- Scoot
- SmileLocal
- TouchLocal

I am also of the opinion that regardless of whether Google still grabs information from these sites or not, they are still strong places of reference that people use. So not including your business in them means you are missing out on potential traffic from these sources regardless of any further benefit they may add.

So citations still work then?

As mentioned above, they still help Google create profiles for businesses that haven’t set up their own one. We also continue to see evidence of this within the SERPs. Look at a Google seven pack and as we pointed out earlier, you will see the number of Google reviews that a profile has.

Search for an actual company and we can see that reviews are included from other sites.

Our example below shows a listing for a hotel in Winchester. As you can see, included are lists of reviews the hotel has received from other sites:

If this type of information was no longer relevant then it wouldn’t be included.

In my opinion what we are seeing from Google is a move to try and push people into using their Google profiles more as opposed to completely ignoring the information provided by other sites.

Setting up Relevant Profiles

If Google are still picking up 3rd party reviews where should I set up profiles? Here are five review sites to get you started:

• Yelp
• Qype
• Bview
• WeLoveLocal
• Tipped

In much the same way as Google Places is set up, these sites allow you to include a decent amount of relevant information and claim your listing.

You will need a login for each one of these sites. Once logged in there is usually an “Add Your Business” option.

As with Google Places you may find that there is already a profile set up. If this is the case, claim it. You will then have full control and you can change and update.

Again fill in all fields as best you can and give as much information as you can. But don’t spam.
Some sites also allow you to include coupons or online offers. These sites have their own communities so you may find it beneficial to take part in this as a way of attracting some new customers.

Fake Reviews

With all the basics in place and profiles set up, gaining reviews is a big area to concentrate on. So the name of the game has to be gaining as many as you can. This can take time leading to one obvious option to speed things up a bit: creating fake reviews.

Should you? No.

No matter how much you think you can cover your tracks, it’s not worth it. If you get caught you will feel the full wrath of Google and you don’t want that. Fake reviews are becoming that much of a problem, so much so that Google are now starting to look into this more and more.

Trip Advisor was recently investigated for including fake reviews on their site and they labelled all hotels they suspected of having fake reviews with a large warning sticker.

The more this happens the stricter these types of sites will become. Don’t get caught in the middle of it.

Negative Reviews

Unless you provide the most flawless of services you are open to receiving negative reviews. If you are out there in the public domain someone will always find something to complain about. If you keep yourself prepared for this, this isn’t something you should worry about.

A lot of companies are wary of putting themselves out there in case they receive negative feedback but actually you can turn this around to your advantage.

Negative reviews give you the chance to show that you are customer facing and more than happy to interact with your audience. Just don’t break the biggest golden rule – Never ignore a bad review.

If you leave it unattended, sat on either your site or a profile you have created somewhere, then it can seriously start to affect how you are perceived.

So how should you respond?

First of all you want to be seen to be acting on the complaint so reply to the review, a majority of review sites allow you the right to reply. Address the problem. If it was your fault there is no harm in admitting this and expressing how you will learn from this.
If it wasn’t your fault, sympathise with the customer but give them the facts.

There may be times when you feel compelled to offer the customer something to compensate. Unless this is related to a faulty product then you should resist. Sure you don’t want disgruntled customers but at the same time you don’t want to be handing out freebies left, right and centre. Doing this could lead to copycat complaints from people just looking for handouts.

Above all – Never get personal.

No matter what is said, no matter what you are accused of, don’t make it personal. That is easier said than done, after all this is your business they are talking about, but always remain professional. You represent your company and future customers will be reading.

You’re now ready to rule local search

If you follow these pointers you will now be better equipped to work towards better local rankings.

As with any online project your work should be on-going. Don’t rest on your laurels thinking you have done enough. These are the areas to look into but all should be reviewed and updated so that you remain on top.

Andy Williams is a Digital Marketing Executive at Koozai a UK SEO Agency with offices in London and Southampton. He can be found on Twitter as @Koozai_Andy.

Image credit: Mary Firth

How to Maximise Your Chances of a Better Local Ranking is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

Ah, +1. You’ve got to love it. Just as we are getting used to the impact of Facebook Likes and Retweets, Google goes and throws its weighty hat in the ring, leaving digital marketers to fumble around in the dark once more, trying to find the light switch and work out how each social button contributes to the marketing mix.

Google +1 and Rank

Over the past few weeks lots has been written in support of both sides of the argument as to whether the Big G is already factoring in these sharing buttons into its ranking algorithm.

Indeed keen followers of SEO news would have read the Wired Scoop suggesting that Google had indeed begun to ‘study the clicks on +1 buttons as a signal that influences the ranking and appearance of websites in search results.’

The result is a raft of websites already offering to sell +1s by the bucket load, undoubtedly leading to some site owners buying them by the truckload in the vain hope that it ‘might’ bring ranking nirvana.

Thankfully sanity has continued to reign within the digital marketing fraternity and the good people at Search Engine Watch posted this level headed piece on Google +1 that has captured the sentiment around +1 abuse and why the mass buying of such signals will hold very little sway in the real world.

This has had most reputable SEOs scratching their heads somewhat, especially as Google is clearly extremely focused on its promotion of +1 and its use as a rank factor. The really BIG news though comes from elsewhere in Google’s vast and ever churning PR machine…

Author Mark-up

Those of you not completely distracted by the fanfare unveiling of Google+ may have noticed this small announcement about Authorship Markup.

On the face of it, this blog post seemed like a fairly insignificant muse that could easily be lost in the raft of recent updates to Google’s products and services. For me though, it offers a truly eye opening insight into G’s plans for the future. Let me explain.

AuthorRank – The Core Rank Algorithm of the Future

We all know that QUALITY is the defining factor in great ranking. It’s not about 10,000 cheaply purchased +1s or thousands of directory links. Instead it’s about the data or ‘trust’ behind each of those recommendation signals.

Its why anybody studying the +1 debate will already tell you that a +1 from a Google+ account with LOTS of followers and an active profile will be worth more to your site, in the same way that a PR6 link stokes the SEO engine. I talk about it more on our SEO blog and it’s potential has also been captured beautifully by SEO by The Sea’s Bill Slawski here, who I will paraphrase for a moment:

On the potential of Google’s Agent Rank: ‘Imagine a system that instead of ranking content on a page level, breaks those pages down and looks at smaller content items on those pages, which it associates with digital signatures. Content creators could be given reputation scores, which could influence the rankings of pages where their content appears, or which they own, edit, or endorse.’

The benefits of such an approach are easy to see. By having such a granular understanding of the content presented by sites the page can become less important and it means that search engines COULD create much richer, relevant search results.

The patent application for doing this was actually granted back in 2007 and combined with the recent announcement that authorship is to become a standard piece in the rich snippet toolset, it is indisputable that Google is now heading for a richer algorithm; one where Authorship or TrustRank play a significant part in the ranking process.

It’s clever in many ways as it reduces reliance (perhaps altogether?!) on the abused Link Trust model we have currently and also ensures that it is the experts (those adding the most value) that are surfaced in any particular vertical.

Here’s a simplified diagram showing how the content ranking algorithm could work:

Clearly the diagram above is extremely simplified and doesn’t include a plethora of other factors that will play a part but it serves as a simple way of understanding the general process of how the new data, now being collected and organized by Google’s data centers, could be used.

In many ways it’s the next big step in search, and a great way for Google to supplement abused Link Trust data with a more solid foundation.

It is not implausible in fact that it may, one day, replace the algorithm that made its name altogether (although this is less likely), to one based on promoting content and, with it, whole sites based purely on the authority of the writers it employs. Or, even further than that, a semantic web that ‘packages’ content by author first rather than by platform or page!

So What Can you do?

In simple terms, and to quote the Cub Scout motto all you can do is ‘Be Prepared’.

By understanding the importance of +1 and other social media integration and the adoption of Author Markup it means you can ensure that your own site/s and those of your clients begin prioritizing quality content and its promotion as highly as obtaining links.

+1 Integration

For those that don’t know how to integrate the +1 button into a site follow this link to Google’s guide and to back it up make sure you have a Google Plus account and that you are actively posting and sharing content. If you want the code cut and paste from here.

Rel=Author

Integrating Rel=author markup is actually pretty straightforward and in a nutshell here’s what you need to do.

In order for the tag to work correctly you must complete three stages:

1. You need to create a page on the domain you are writing for all about you. Let’s call this /simonpenson.
2. This page then needs linking to your GooglePlus profile page
3. Finally link that profile page back to the /simonpenson page for verification.

Sounds simple enough and in practice it really is. If you have lots of authors you have to rinse and repeat of course, but the process is exactly the same.

For specifics on how to add the markup Google has it’s own implementation guide.

Get it right, however, and the impact on clickthrough rates alone makes the effort worthwhile. The screenshot below shows you just how much standout it gives you:

And the result of all of this? It means that as site owners and SEOs we need to start putting great content creators at the centre of everything we do again because the internet is no longer about the platform but the content that it delivers – and Google is leading that charge.

Simon Penson is the owner of Zazzle Media, a specialist UK SEO and Social Media management agency.

Image credit: yui.kubo

Google’s Heading for Life after Link Trust – Here’s How to Prepare is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

I love it when we catch Google testing new stuff – Dan just caught this latest test in Google’s search results, also caught a few weeks back at Blogstorm:

Google appear to have moved the URL for the search result underneath the title element of the search result. As it happens, it’s the ranking URL on display – when I got the heads up on this, I’d almost expected the exact match name test to be included, too.

Here’s a screen shot for “used cars”

Finally, here’s what a rich snippets result looks like:

Google Testing URLs Under Titles in SERPS is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

Unless anyone cares to correct me, I’m seeing a new type of flight search result in Google (UK) – the query was “flights to Barcelona” (as I’ll be flying over there on June 8th for DomainFest).

Here’s the result:

And here’s how the result looks when the “Show all non-stop routes” link is clicked:

The expanded query pushes the organic search results all the way to the bottom of the page, effectively reducing the value of organic visibility to nil.

Google Testing Flight Search Results in UK is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

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Google have been playing around with movie listings in SERPs for a while– displaying snippets that include ratings information, links through to trailers and reviews too. However, today we caught these results for “cinema” and “theatre” in the UK results.

Individual film pages are formed from comprehensive aggregated data – being pulled through from authoritative sources and those utilizing reviews/microformat:

Interestingly this is also occurring in regards to searches for ‘theatre’[?]

Location specific “theatre” searches:

Location specific searches yield aggregated local-search data – with cinema specific address and show time listings:

And here’s what Google is rolling out if you’re unable to see the above:

Theatre & Movie Listings in Google Search Results is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

Since the very beginning of our craft, Search Engine Optimisers have obsessed over the subtle complexities of the numerous ranking factors determining their precious organic rankings. Since Google’s Panda update, and the subsequent “dozen or so” changes to the algorithm, perhaps the SEO world has changed forever.

Not an easy update to understand

When the Panda update came along, the typical torrent of analysis and conjecture followed predictably – but still weeks after the update, few SEO’s could pinpoint exactly what had changed, and what strategy to deploy to remedy the symptoms of a demoted site. That struggle continues. In my opinion, Panda is no one specific “thing” – it’s a combination of new and interesting factors, most likely made possible via the Caffeine crawl and index infrastructure. Fortunately, Google continue to help webmasters affected and write about the topic on their Webmaster Central Blog.

On Friday, Google released more guidance on building high quality sites, acknowledging that their recent update(s) were focused on a range of factors designed to focus on user experience, and that webmasters should consider those factors to improve, repair or preserve their rankings.

Google justify their refusal to be entirely transparent about the specifics of their ranking algorithm: “because we don’t want folks to game our search results”. In his post, Information Retrieval specialist Amit Singhal (read his publications here) offers the web master a solution; “if you want to step into Google’s mindset, the questions below provide some guidance on how we’ve been looking at the issue”.

Let’s take a look at the list and endulge in a little guesswork. How might an SEO translate Amit’s comments in that post?

Q: Would you trust the information presented in this article?

SEO translation: “Trust” could be measured by the links (citations) awarded to the article, the more authoritative the link, the more trust worthy the article. Of course, the article itself could have an impact on it’s own trustworthiness by how carefully choosen the resources it cites as an authorative source may be. Linking to low quality sites, penalised sites or downright awful places on the internet is hardly likely to inspire trust, is it? If links alone answer this question, there’s nothing new in what I just said. We continue to attract natural, editorially awarded links to our websites by crafting great content.

If significant volumes of links aren’t available just yet, perhaps a shorter term solution could be to analyse the social buzz associated with the article. Was there a big discussion surrounding the URL on Twitter? How many people shared the URL via Facebook? How authoritative were the users sharing these articles? “Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?”, a question that appears in our list, feels quite relevant here.

I found the “For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?” question interesting. Advice from very poor quality health websites could be life threatening – perhaps a nod to the importance of citation from trustworthy medical journals and publications?

Further reading: Domain trust and site authority is explained well in Rand’s “Whiteboard Friday – Domain Trust and Authority“. Matt Cutts, in his PageRank Sculpting post from June 2009 states “In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.” SEOoptimise later encourage linking out to quality sites using deep links in their March 2011 article, “How to link out for SEO benefit”. Finally, the arguments made in “Facebook + Twitter’s Influence on Google’s Search Rankings” are highly worthy of consideration, SEOmoz, April 2011.

Q: Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?

SEO translation: “Shallow content” might refer to a document that touches on a subject, but misses key ideas associated with the topic. Perhaps the work is very short, “thin” or fails to cite expert, authority sources elsewhere on the web.

Google also asks: “Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?”. Here’s an example of exactly that – the sad irony being the article attracted enough attention from our industry as an example of exceptionally thin, at scale generated content that it now ranks well for “how to install Photoshop”.

Let’s not forget the key people behind this update are Information Retrieval specialists. There’s no doubt in my mind that the complexity of Google’s topic modelling has been evolving to understand, specifically, the nature of “quality” for the benefit of people using search engines. I think that’s a good thing, too. It’s not just about detecting pages with no unique content, or “thin” content – it’s about algorithmically detecting how deep an article goes in covering a subject. Whether the algorithm is truly successful at that objective or not, you have to admire the sentiment, and respect the level of engineering search engine mechanics are using to achieve the outcome. “Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?” and “Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?”, are questions listed in the post that also feel relevant here.

The question: “Is the article written by an expert?” is a very interesting concept. You can search by author in Google Groups, Scholar and Google News, but could author be a (meta) data point in Google’s Caffeine infrastructure? Can the author name be associated with a social network that regularly discuss this topic, and share URLs that relate to the idea?

A later question in the Google article; “Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?” might be related – in that article authors may not be considered to have expert status in a field. Large volumes of content that receive little “attention or care” would be unlikely to earn any authority links and would likely become “redundant” (see next section).

Further reading: Read everything Dave Harry has researched and written on the topic of semantic search / topic modelling and you’re easily immersed in a fascinating subject. Read everything found on SEO by the Sea. When you’re done, try; Understanding Semantic Search and SEO, Search Engine Journal, May 2010 and Google Rankings and LDA, Search News Central, July 2010. For a simple, but practical demonstration of LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) in action, check out SEOmoz’s LDA tool, or Virante’s LDA Content Optimiser.

Q: Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?

SEO translation: Article sites that host spun content, beware. Look out for excessive internal duplication and get your SEO strategy just right for heavily duplicated, thin index pages. “Overlapping” might imply that large quantities of articles that don’t really develop an idea (just essentially saying the same thing over and over). This sounds like an attempt to identify sites that host spun content.

Take these, genuine spun article examples – all taken from the same website:

“Learn Primary Spanish Quickly With These four Steps”

“Teaching Tools for Learning Conversational Spanish”

“Learn Spanish – The Quick and Enjoyable Manner – It’s Easy With These four Ideas”

“Learning Spanish? Here’s The right way to Make It Easier and More Enjoyable!”

The thing is, you can tell a low quality, spun article a mile off. Obviously, articles like this add no value, and speaking on behalf of users, they’d never be missed. For search engines, there are usually multiple indexed versions of the same article, but they won’t be perfectly varied. Search engines should easily be able to spot the “markers” of a spun article, perhaps detecting sentences that are the same over many different iterations of the document across multiple domains. Easy to detect (you’d think), and surely easy to penalise. “400% unique” doesn’t mean unique.

“Redundant” could mean large quantities of articles that are buried very deeply in your site, but have acquired no external links whatsoever. No one wants to link to rubbish, and now that article is buried 100 or so paging links deep on a site, no one will ever, ever find it. If your domain had a large amount of this type of content (a far higher ratio of old pages with no links compared to pages with links), you were definitely at risk from Panda (whether you were actually penalised is a different matter).

Further reading: For a primer on what, exactly content spinning is, check out Rishi’s article on the topic. For a good break down of the types of duplicate content (and strategies to make internal pages more unique) check out Dr Pete’s “Fat Pandas and thin Content”. The warning came in early, though – check out “Googlers to Webmasters: Remove Your Thin Content“. Re-read advice on the May Day update, and work to the mantra (like we do) that if a page generates no traffic from organic search, it may be a candidate for removal.

Q: Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?

SEO translation: Is this site secure and has it been verified by reputable credit card transaction providers, is it PCI compliant?

Guessing how this could factor be detected (if at all) is a big of a leap of faith for any SEO – the tangible signals from a website that it’s safe could be a link back to the verification page offered by companies like Verisign or Truste, or a link from those sites back to the merchant. Retail sites like this one display badges for all of their security accreditations and are linking to the appropriate location. It’s a little like a Google Adwords certified agency – you’re issued with a page at Google that verifies you are an authorised consultant. Perhaps there are noted, high trust signals online that will almost guarantee a site is secure?

Further reading: There’s no direct resource to link actual SEO and retailer reputation, but reputation and credibility is incredibly important for conversions. “Retailer Reputation: Showing Off Your Street Cred” over at Getelastic outlines some of the general strategies retailers could employ, but I think it would be important test the conversion rate impact on your own site by including these logos. Trust is a key element in conversion, and seemingly in Google’s opinion on quality, too.

Q: Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?

SEO translation: Bad grammar, spelling mistakes and formatting errors just don’t look great to users and are probably very easy to detect for search engines. The occasional typo is unavoidable from time to time but an excess of poor spelling and grammar is, plain embarrassing.

The question, “Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?” might also refer to spelling, stylistic and factual errors, as might “How much quality control is done on content?” covered later in this post.

Further reading: Spell checking on websites has been on the “quality issues” list since, forever. Matt Cutts was pleading with web masters to spell check their sites in 2006. Much more recently, Google can determine reader level of a document, and even translate poetry with their AI capabilities.

If you’re running on ASP .net, get your development team to install this extension for Visual Studio 2010. Otherwise you could hack together a quick tool from Google’s spell check API, or ask my friend over at SEOmoz QA for a helping hand.

Q: Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?

SEO translation: Think about it. On a real blog, you’re never going to see highly competitive keywords in every post title. SEOgadget talks about a bunch of things my team and I are interested in – we’re not writing for competitive keywords in the articles themselves. Sometimes a post flops, sometimes it lives for an unexpectedly long period.

Think back to the learn Spanish example given above. If each post in succession happens to include high value / high volume search terms (or terms with high bid / impressions in adwords), then there’s surely something wrong. It just doesn’t look natural. I don’t want to read endless variations of “how to” + learn + French based articles, who would?

The other part of the question posed by Amit was the “generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well”. I’m only taking a wild guess here, but data sources such as the suggest API and wonder wheel can make a really easily scraped source of new article idea data. In fact I’m aware of organisations that generate content by executing a suggest API scrape, fetch adwords api search volume and use this data on a priority basis for their content strategy.

Which came first, insight and quality or traffic and rankings?

Further reading: Rand’s “A Recommendation for Google’s Webspam Team” touched on the concept of starting with high value adwords terms to detect likely candidates for search engine link spam. I agree with Rand that it’s possible this data already influences how the web spam team might work, and it might not take much of a leap of the imagination to consider how search data could be fed back into an algorithm to assess the likely quality of an article.

Q: Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?

SEO translation: What’s the point in writing an article if it doesn’t add something new to the discussion? This is very true for news based content – if you’re regurgitating what 100+ other publishers have just said, good luck getting it to rank. The concept translates easily into organic search – it’s good to develop a topic, add a thoughtful, unique or different angle to an idea, but to simply replicate it is poor. “Original reporting” could be translated in to “first discovered” – have you broken a topic or developed it significantly at a very early stage of development?

The footprint left by “Original research” should be very easy to predict. If you’ve published an item of research or some original data, it’s bound to attract a series of citations from authors who go on to develop, comment, agree, disagree, review and so on. Look how a UK tech news site reports on a piece of research on the Panda update.

Further reading: Creating great content is something you do all the time, or it isn’t. If it’s not – you need to learn. Understand the needs of your target audience and develop topics around their interests. If you’re making your website an indispensable resource optimised for tonnes of great brand recognition and repeat visits then you’ll (hopefully) be able to get over the crack cocaine that is commercially skewed nonsense and start to add value. There are heaps of resources dedicated to great writing, copyblogger is a fantastic example.

Q: Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?

SEO translation: Does your landing page meet the likely expectations of search engine users? Google is listening to user feedback, and incorporating that data into their ranking results. Even with no toolbar feedback, Google could assess nominal user behaviour patterns for a query by looking at bounce rate and return velocity for all of the results – if a high ranking result stands out with poorer than average metrics, it might be a candidate for dismissal.

Using heavily optimised anchor text can influence web pages to rank for queries that might not be a perfect best fit for that query. Cannibalised keyword strategy in inbound anchor text could be a problem for the future, if a ranking encourages a bounce or a user complaint (block): “Would users complain when they see pages from this site?”.

Further reading: “Hide sites to find more of what you want“, Google March 2011 and “High-quality sites algorithm goes global, incorporates user feedback“, Google April 2011. “Microsoft’s Approach to Identifying Quality Search Results Based on User Feedback“, SEO By The Sea, May 2011.

Q: How much quality control is done on content?

SEO translation: Beyond the initial, obvious quality factors such as spelling and grammar, there’s also the question of detail and substance; “Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?”.

Then I considered if keeping articles accurate and up to date might be an interesting factor in quality control. There might be temporal factors influencing “quality” over time. Certain types of article, over time, might become less accurate. A really good example of this is my guide on installing Ubuntu. Gradually, the instructions have become closer to obsolete. Despite a few major rewrites over the years, it’s definitely time to update it again.

It may not be enough simply to have an archive of “great” content. Ideas grow old, best practices expire. Perhaps great SEO strategy should incorporate rewriting and updating article and guide content.

Further reading: “Headsmacking Tip #11 – Refresh Legacy Content for a Rankings Boost” – SEOmoz, January 2009.

Q: Does the article describe both sides of a story?

SEO translation: Is this page overly commercially skewed, or does it provide a balanced outline of a subject? For example, a website promoting products may be producing overly skewed articles encouraging users simply to buy, rather than consider alternatives. The content may be entirely positive – where reviews and sentiments gathered elsewhere on the web may disagree.

How a search engine might recognise balance in an article, its sentiment, could be in some way related to the technology used to understand sentiment in product reviews, tweets and blog content. Back in 2009, Matt Cutts confirmed that “If you sort by reviews, Google will perform sentiment analysis and highlight interesting comments”. The technology has obviously been around for some time – RankSpeed, for example, attempts to recommend the ”best” products and websites based on the sentiment in which they’re described in tweets and blogs.

How far this approach is applied to the analysis of “both sides” of a story is difficult to predict, but perhaps Google understand when an article seems overly skewed in favour of a particular idea, when in fact the topic should be balanced with viewpoints from differing perspectives?

Further reading: “Google’s New Review Search Option and Sentiment Analysis“, SEO By The Sea, June 2009. Google’s “Gold Standard” Search Results Take Big Hit In New York Times Story, Search Engine Land, November 2010. “Sentiment Analysis for SEO“, Science For SEO, January 2009.

Q: Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?

SEO translation: Is a site well linked to, by authority sites in a related niche? Sites that cover too broad a range of topics may be difficult to identify as an authority source when compared to sites that focus on a very narrow range of topics, particularly in communites that require a higher degree of peer recognition (SEO being an excellent example of this).

This may not be a problem in niches that are saturated with websites covering a broad range of topics, but for subjects that have many recognised authorities on a subject, broadly focused sites may not perform well.

Valuable inbound links, the relevance to topic of the sites they originate from and keywords in inbound anchors may be a factor. Frequently appearing, relevant terms on the site might also provide a key insight into the level of focus on the topic identified.

Q: Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?

SEO Translation: “Brand” search volume was suspected as an influential factor related to the Vince update, or at least a factor used to contribute to a brand’s “authority”. Central to recognition is pure search volume – if there are many searches for a company name and domain name, it’s fair to assume that the company in question have a strong brand. An established brand name is a signal of trust, and has been (I suspect) for a long time.

Further reading: “How search volume data may be used to determine brand authority“, Blogstorm, July 2009. “Google’s Vince Update – Brand or No Brand?“, SEOgadget, July 2009.

Q: Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?

SEO Translation: Google have a mechanism to evaluate the balance of ads versus original content on web pages. Tom was on this almost straight away. His custom search engine will show you results for any website “hit” by the Panda update. Choose a web page at random (like this one) and test it in browser size:

Oh dear, it’s all ads. Check out this help article from the Google Adsense Team: “Best practices for laying out your site and your ads” (Via SEO Theory). Their advice?

“Show off your content: While placing ads above the fold is a good way to improve ad performance, also make sure that users can easily find the content they are looking for. For example, if your site offers downloads, make sure the download links are above the fold and easy to find.”

Further reading: “Best practices for laying out your site and your ads“, Google. “Deconstructing Google“, Gianluca Fiorelli, March 2011, “What the Google Panda Update has Taught the SEO Industry“, SEO Theory, May 2011, “TED 2011: The ‘Panda’ That Hates Farms: A Q&A With Google’s Top Search Engineers“, Wired, February 2011 and last but by no means least, “Google’s Panda Update – What to do About It“, Distilled, February 2011.

Ranking factors increase in complexity

We can analyse until the cows come home – in fact, I spent much longer than I probably should have writing this post. This update was the most impressive in Google’s update history – it kept the SEO industry guessing for a long, long time. It turns out the answer is that it’s important to understand the many variables of quality. If you’re prepared to come to terms with the fact that it’s not just a technical thing any more, it becomes a lot easier to understand the direction we, as SEOs all now headed in. In the future, it seems SEO has the opportunity to evolve in to something a lot more like product consulting.

In the end, building great sites that people love is a most rewarding experience. In a way I’m glad Google are taking us in this direction, but they, like us, still have a long way to go with this update.

Image Credit: Impact Matt

High Quality Web Sites – The New Google Ranking Factor is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

Why install Chrome OS? As a digital marketer, it might be beneficial to have insight into projects outside of pure SEM that could one day affect the way we work. Take the Nexus One for example. Google are working on projects in many different industries that one day could impact our lives as fundamentally as organic search does today. To that end, it’s probably worth following these instructions and giving Chrome OS a try.

How to Install Google’s Chrome OS in a Windows Virtual Machine

Quite a bit of fuss has been made about Google’s new browser based operating system, Chrome OS. Although the operating system is intended to be installed on a netbook, early adopters who can’t wait to try out Chrome can see what the future holds by installing it on a virtual machine.

VMWare is the most widely known name in virtual computing; however, we are going to see how we can run this on the open source virtualization project known as VirtualBox. Originally created by Sun Microsystems, VirutalBox is still available after Sun was bought by Oracle and can be obtained from here. If you’re using Ubuntu, you might want to try this primer on how to install Virtualbox before installing Chrome OS.

Installing VirtualBox

VirtualBox is a pretty standard installation. After you choose the host operating system (the operating system of the computer where you are installing VirtualBox), you can click on the Run button to begin or Save the .exe file to your desktop and launch it from there.

Once you launch the Setup Wizard, you are presented with a welcome screen. Click Next to advance. The next screen is the License Agreement. Read over this and if acceptable, select “I accept” and click on Next.

The next screen you are presented with is the Custom Setup screen pictured below. This allows you to choose the different options for installing VirtualBox. We are going to keep the defaults and press Next, but you are encouraged to explore the options when you are more comfortable with what the software can do.

On the next screen, choose where you would like a shortcut to be created and click the Next button.

Once you have chosen the location of the shortcuts, you will be warned that continuing with the installation will temporarily disconnect you from your network while the connections are reset. This is perfectly fine so click Yes to continue.

At the next screen, click Install to begin. This will take a few minutes to run depending on your computer.

If you are alerted to compatibility issues, you can click “Continue Anyway” each time it appears. As the installation process continues, you will be reconnected to your network before you are informed that the installation is complete.

Click Finish and you are done. Now, VirtualBox will open for you as seen in the following screen shot (Click to enlarge):

Installing Chrome

The first part of installing Chrome OS is complete. We now have a working copy of a virtualization software application to install to. Before we can proceed, we need to get a copy of Chrome OS. There are plenty of torrent sites that have copies available but we are doing to use one that can be downloaded directly from a recommended web site because we know it has been tested on VirtualBox. Browse to this download site and create an account. Once you have downloaded Chrome, extract it to a location where you can easily find it.

Going back to VirtualBox, click on the New button in the upper left hand corner. This will start the wizard to create your Chrome OS virtual machine. At the welcome screen, click Next and you will be taken to the “VM Name and OS Type screen”. Name your machine and under “OS Type”, select Linux for the Operating System and leave the Version set to Ubuntu and click on the Next button.

The next screen allows you to set the memory that will be allocated to your virtual machine. The default will provide enough for you to test out your machine, but this can be adjusted if you choose. When you have this set, click on Next to continue.

The next screen asks you to select the hard disk image that will be used to boot Chrome OS. Since we downloaded a pre-built machine, we will select Use existing hard disk. If we had installed Chrome OS already, we would be able to select it from the list. Since this is the first installation, we will need to browse to the virtual machine we extracted earlier by clicking on the browse icon which is the little folder.

The browse icon opens the Virtual Media Manager where we can select the hard disk we wish to use. Since Chrome is not yet listed, click on Add and then navigate to the extracted Chrome OS file, chrome-os-0.4.22.8-gdgt.vmdk. Select this file and click Open. Now that Chrome has been added to the Media Manager, highlight it and click on Select. You will be brought back to the Virtual Hard Disk screen. Here, click Next.

At the Summary screen, look over all of the parameters. If everything checks out, click on Finish.

Running Chrome OS

Now that everything has been installed, it’s time to take Chrome for a test drive. Chrome OS should now be listed as an option. To boot it up, highlight it in the list (it may be the only one) and click Start.

Once the boot process starts up, you will be alerted that the Virtual Machine will auto-capture your keyboard. This screen also gives you directions how to uncapture the keyboard so you can work on your host machine as well. After reading these instructions, click OK to proceed. When Chrome OS boots up you will be asked to login. Use your Google account credentials and start playing around in your new operating system!

Our friend Jeff Orloff wrote this for Tophost.gr, a web host in Greece offering both shared hosting and dedicated servers

How to Install Google’s Chrome OS in a Windows Virtual Machine is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

I noticed a really interesting behaviour on our branded search results a few weeks ago. For some queries, Google will change the title displayed in the search results. This might not be new to some, but I think it’s worth sharing.

Our desired search result snippet

Variation on the brand term: “SEO gadget”

Google has reworked our title in this snippet to read: “SEO Gadget”. If you add the NOODP meta into your homepage header, this goes away:

I tested this again by removing the tag, watching the search result return to its previous state, and then reimplemented the NOODP tag to check that the changing meta was responsible for the behaviour in the snippet.

Where is Google actually getting the text from?

To be fair I’m not completely certain where Google is getting the “SEO Gadget” text from. Our homepage doesn’t actually use the exact term: “SEO Gadget”. For interest, I added this phrase to see what would happen during the NOODP testing, but the change had no impact.

I think the two most feasible signals:

1) The ODP itself

2) Our top inbound anchor text

I suspect it’s more of the former rather than the latter, but perhaps both! Have you seen this issue before and fixed it? I’m really interested to hear about it.

The Impact of NOODP on Titles in SERPS is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk. Going to this year's SMX Advanced London? Use this discount code - SEOGADGET011 to get 15% off your entrance fee!

When we look to the future of the internet and how SEO is evolving, what can we expect to find on the agenda in the not so distant future with regards to website mark up?

Image credit: Dominicspics

Well, no one can truly predict the future but by looking at recent past developments we can certainly find a general trend that we are all starting to follow. In my first post as an seo consultant at SEOGadget I will be looking into the use of HTML 5 and (Richards favourite) Micro Formats.

HTML5 – What’s New?

Ok let’s start off with HTML 5 and the introduction of new elements and attributes which not only make a webmasters job a lot easier and more flexible, but more importantly provide a greater context about the content contained on a web page.

For example here are some of these new HTML 5 elements:

• <nav>
• <footer>
• <audio>
• <video>

Although W3C standards are a set of generic website guidelines which do not necessarily influence SEO directly, the mark up can to some extent be understood by search engines e.g. they expect to see a website header, navigation, content area and some kind of footer. Back at the start of 2009 Dave Harry wrote a great post on page segmentation concepts and how search engines are able to identify common elements on page to determine a framework for a website.

As a result of HTML 5, areas of a web page can now be more easily defined which in turn will provide a solid framework of a page to search engines. In doing so will at the same time provide more specific detail of the content contained on a given web page, which search engines can then use to their advantage in their algorithms.

The Launch of Rich Snippets (Micro Formats, Micro Data and RDFa)

The developments in Micro Formats (as well as Micro Data and RDFa) are also part of an evolutionary chain to provide even greater detail about specific pieces of content on a web page. When Google launched rich snippets back in 2009, support for some micro formats was introduced and as a result these have gradually been incorporated within some types of search queries.

Here are some Micro Formats which are currently supported to some extent by Google:

• hReview-aggregate – This property provides a generic average rating based on the data within individual hreview listings. Attributes include rating, count, and summary.
• hReview – Describes individual review listings with attributes including rating, reviewer, dtreviewed (ISO date format) and description.
• hProduct – Describes an individual product with attributes including fn (name), brand, category, price, description and photo.
• hCalendar – Describes an event including attributes location, dtend (ISO date format) and duration (ISO date duration).
• hRecipe – Describes a specific recipe with attributes including ingredient, instructions, duration and photo.
• hCard – Describes contact/profile information with attributes including fn (name), email, logo, photo, and url.

These micro formats can all influence the information presented on search results. For example a combination of hreview-aggregate, hreview and hrproduct (which could typically be used to describe a product on an ecommerce website), can produce a listing with rating information pulled in:

An example listing of hcalendar incorporated within a web page:

An example of a search result including hrecipe and hreview-aggregate:

An example of a search result incorporating hcard:

Although these are the only Micro formats that we have seen influence search results to date, there is still a number of attributes which although supported do not provide a direct impact on the display of search results and are currently under-going testing.

For example if we take the hproduct property, we have the ability to add attributes such as category, price and photo which currently do not bear any impact on the display of product page search results (although hproduct can be incorporated alongside hreview to display the price), but the attributes themselves are supported by Google.

Could this be an early indicator from Google that micro formats will be playing a more influential role in the development of search listings?

As the idea of micro formats is to provide even greater detail about specific content contained on a web page (as a set of standards), you can clearly see why search engines such as Google have jumped in and developed their search results to display this data. By encouraging webmasters to include micro formats, Google will be able to understand more about the content contained within a website, and could use this information to further judge the relevance of a website to different search queries and provide an insight into developing new potential products.

A recent article on readwriteweb.com – ‘Google’s Semantic Web Push: Rich Snippets Usage Growing‘ also indicates the growing popularity of rich snippets and how Google is trying to encourage web masters to introduce this on their websites.

If we then combine this with news that micro formats 2.0 discussions are already under way to simplify the integration, could this amplify Google’s quest for a greater understanding of website content.

The Evolution of Content is King

In a “Content is King” SEO world how can Google look to evolve this one key strategy to create even more relevant results for its users?

Google have reached out directly to the guys behind the internet, website developers/designers/owners and encouraged the use of even simpler coding with HTML5. A great article at Techcrunch on Google’s HTML5Rocks explains how Google is one of the major players pushing the development of HTML5.

The integration of rich snippets and support for Micro Formats, Micro Data and RDFa is another step to encourage webmasters for the change in mark up by displaying more informative search listings in their rankings.

When you combine the two and look behind the scenes Google have been very clever in gradually integrating a format which will ultimately provide them with a lot more knowledge on the structure and content of websites. This will undoubtedly become an influential factor within the rankings, and future services provided by Google.

The developments in website mark up and rich snippets go a long way in providing a greater insight into the future evolution, not only in SEO but the internet as a whole.

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Hope you enjoyed my first post on SEOGadget, it would be great to hear your feedback!
Daniel

Google’s Underlying Plan for HTML5 and Rich Snippets is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk, UK SEO consultants helping people and organisations succeed in search.