| From the Editor: |
 Dear
Reader
How has the first half of 2010 been for you?
Conferences and training events have been keeping me extremely busy over the past few months.
In March I gave face-to-face SEO and Pay Per Click advertising workshops
to small businesses in Christchurch. In April I attended the Search Marketing Expo Conference and ran a face-to-face PPC
Workshop in Sydney. I also spent the better part of a week in Melbourne having some down time.
The SMX Sydney Conference had a completely different feel this year. With registrations topping 1,000 for Day One, a new venue in the Sydney Hilton and some seriously impressive speakers, it was almost as if the industry in Australia had finally grown up. If you missed the Conference, catch some of my live blog posts of the sessions. Or there's my Facebook SMX 2010 photo album if you'd rather see a visual snapshot.
When I had a client ask me a few days later what my biggest take away from the Conference was, I was surprised to find myself answering "Facebook is the most powerful business tool on the web". What? A social media epiphany at a search conference? I guess that means that social media is no longer a value-add, but a key component of any search marketing campaign. The number of sessions dedicated to social media this year underscored this.
In late April and
May I spent many hours coaching Christchurch-based small businesess in
SEO and PPC on behalf of the Canterbury Development Corporation and quite a lot of my coaching touched upon their use of social media. It was
absolutely fascinating getting to know more about small businesses here
in New Zealand and the particular search marketing challenges they face.
And suddenly, here we are at the end of May and we're only at Issue Two of the Search Light newsletter for 2010.
Why so few newsletters? Apart from my crazy schedule, I blame Google. They've had so many new product rollouts and announcements this year that I can barely keep up getting my head round them all, let alone writing articles about them! I've also been mastering my procrastination skills quite well lately.
However, I did find time to write an article about Google's most important rollout this year: Social Search. This month's feature article provides an introduction to Google Social Search, as well as the lowdown on how you can use it to your advantage in the War on Search Engine Rankings.
By way of apology for the late newsletter, we're offering subscribers an exclusive USD 50 discount on any of our certification courses at Search Engine College for the next 14 days. Your discount link is below right.
Enjoy this issue and remember to visit the Ask Kalena blog to check out our daily answers to frequently asked search engine questions.
Got a question of your own? Gobsmacked by Google? Yikes about Yahoo? Press the big green button at the end of this newsletter to send us your question and you might see it featured here next month.
Until then - wishing you clicks and conversions...
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| Feature Article: |
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Google Social Search - Choose Your Friends Wisely
By Kalena Jordan
Refusing to sit still long enough for anyone to catch up, Google has rolled out another Labs experiment to the public. Google Social Search Beta launched last October, hard on the heels of Personalized Search. But in January this year, Google graduated Social Search out of Labs and into the public sphere.
What Is Google Social Search?
As we become increasingly connected online, we start to build around ourselves a community of people that we have regular contact with and websites where we spend much of our time. This is called our social network. Now Google has worked out a way to measure and leverage these individual social networks so they influence the search results we see. Those results therefore become more relevant to us and more influential over time.
Google determines your social network based on the connections found in your public Google profile. Connections are classed as either direct connections or secondary connections. Your Gmail chat buddies and contacts are direct connections, as are connections from links listed in your Google profile (e.g. people you follow on Twitter, LinkedIn, or FriendFeed).
Secondary connections are those publicly associated with your direct connections (e.g. the people that your friends follow on Twitter).
To see your social profile on Google, login to your Google account and visit the Social Dashboard. The first time you do this, Google will collect all the social data it has stored about you, based on your Google Profile and public content, and build what they call your *social circle*.
After Google builds your social circle, whenever Google's algorithm determines that your search experience will be improved, it annotates regular web index data with social data customized from your social circle and adds this information to the bottom of your search results.
You MUST be signed in to Google to see this. If you're not happy with the results, say from Twitter, you can delete your Twitter account from your Google profile to prevent published info from your Twitter connections being added to your social circle.
You can also add or block Google contacts so you don't see information from them in your social circle. In the reverse, you can choose what content you want to make public, based on your published Google profile.
How Does Social Search Work?
Google Social Search has been in experimental mode since October, but earlier this year it was rolled out to full public Beta, meaning you should now see social content in your search results on Google.com. Google has also rolled Social Search out to most of their regional sites.
To see social search results in action, login to your Google account, then run a search. You'll see the heading *Results from people in your social circle* towards the bottom of the search results page. For example, if I run a search for *music blogs* on Google.com, I get the following social circle suggestions:
(Click to view larger image)
Because Matt Burgess and Tim Burrowes are in my social circle and have blogged about music, I see their content at the top of my social circle results.
If you want to see more social results, click on the *Show Options* link at the top left of the page and click on the *Social* link in the side menu under *All Results*. This will bring up search results sourced entirely from your social network. You'll also see a list of your friends and connections under the menu heading *All People*. You can click on a particular name in the list to bring up more results from their public content.
Next to your social circle results are two links that are new additions to the service added to coincide with the public rollout: my social circle and my social content (pictured). These take you to your social circle dashboard that I linked to earlier.
The *my social circle* tab displays your extended network of online contacts, as well as the pathways that connect you. Clicking on the *my social content* tab brings up your public social media profiles, taken from your Google profile, that might appear in other people's social results (pictured).
 (Click to view larger image)
Apart from this social dashboard, the other major difference between the original Social Search experiment and the new public rollout is the addition of Google Images into the mix. If anyone in your social circle has shared images on Flickr or Picasa and Google determines they are relevant to your search query, you may see these in your search results as well.
Judging by my social search experiments to date, I believe Google has been collating social results for some time. A key observation is that relevance seems to win over freshness in the social influenced search results - some of the top results in my social circle were from 2008.
(Click to view larger image)
How Do You Take Advantage of Social Search?
1. If you haven't already done so, create a Gmail account and create and flesh out your Google Profile immediately.
2. Join more social sites if you want your content to appear in the SERPs of your direct and secondary social circle networks, particularly the primary ones Twitter, Flickr and FriendFeed.
3. Optimize your social media content (tweets, FB and LinkedIn status updates, blog feeds, etc) for target keywords to ensure your social content is shown in a wider number of social circle SERPs.
4. Gmail and Chat contacts get top billing in your social circle so choose your Gmail buddies wisely or remove them from your profile altogether.
5. Consider the type of social content that is popular and most often shared within your networks. Concentrate on building similar content in your public social media profiles to ensure it gets syndicated via your social circle.
6. If Universal Search wasn't enough of a punch in the gut to convince you to optimize your multimedia content, consider Social Search to be that punch placed a little lower. Your shared photos just became another content channel.
7. Become more picky about who you follow and what social feeds you subscribe to. They have just become influencers in your every day search results.
What if I Don't Like It?
If your particular social circle seems a little lightweight or top heavy, you can control what results you do and don't see under your social search results. You can choose to either remove a social network from your Google profile (such as Twitter or Facebook), or remove a specific contact from your network.
You can ignore the social results at the bottom of the page when signed in, or if you don't wish to see any social search results at all, simply conduct your searches while signed out of your Google account.
It's important to note that Google doesn't make your social circle public e.g. publish your list of chat buddies. It simply adds your buddies' public information to YOUR social circle.
What Does it All Mean?
What this really means is that standard SERPs are a thing of the past. Over the last couple of years, we've come to expect that a search for *blue widgets* will pull up completely different results for someone in London and someone in New York. But with Google having rolled out personalized search, real time search and now social search, you and your flatmate could be sharing an Internet connection in the same room and be served very different SERPs for identical search queries.
As for how this impacts online marketing? For starters, if you've been hoping social media will just go away, it's time to wake up and smell the pancakes. Not only is online social networking not going anywhere, it is thriving and changing how we search. It is now in your interest to expand your social network and create a presence on as many social sites as you can.
More importantly, your clients will be looking to you to help them understand how to use social search to their advantage. Embrace the opportunity and get socializing.
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.
Search Industry Job of the Month
Got positions vacant or short term projects you'd like advertised? Sign up for a free account with the Search Engine College Jobs Board and find great candidates.
Want your vacancy to appear here? Contact Us.
Create your own Search Marketing Job at The Jar Group!
Job Title: To be creatively determined...
Job Reference #:
Position Type: Full Time
Name of Employer: The Jar Group
Location: New York, USA
Date Posted: 26 May 2010
Position Description:
The JAR Group is a three-year-old company with a smart, energetic staff. The JAR Group prides itself on having fun while doing high-quality work (They have the expected benefits, but they also have an on staff DJ, a growing bicycle gang, bagel Thursdays, free beer Fridays...and best a great team).
The JAR Group aren't looking for a candidate that fits any specific list of requirements, rather, they'd like to find a candidate that wants to help them grow and create value for their clients.
What The JAR Group needs is a hard-working, personable human being (you MUST be human--although there may be exceptions made for well-documented demi-humans) who is extremely organized, creative (no in-the-box thinkers allowed), good with numbers, a self-starter, and most importantly, they want someone who loves search marketing and understands how it integrates into the overall online marketing arena.
The JAR Group are interested in working with interesting people. So, you need be an advocate of the value that search marketing can bring to clients, be able to lead and grow a team, and be able to roll up your sleeves to get "it" done. Basically, they need you to be a little bit of everything. How you do it and with what mixture of skills and experience, well that is up to you.
This position has no title. The JAR Group want you to tell them what you think the role should be. You can apply to them as a Director of Search Marketing, a Search Strategist, or even a Lion Tamer for all they care. they just want to find a good person who rocks hard on search marketing (air-guitaring while developing link bait... bonus points) and who fits in with the team like a well-placed puzzle piece. You know what you can do so The JAR Group want you to create the role around their needs, and more importantly, around the needs of their clients.
To be considered, you need to do more then just send them a resume (resume email bombs go straight to our archives). Just tacking on a generic cover letter will also probably get you archived without any conversation. Email them, twitter them, blog about them, or hire a skywriter and let them know what you want to create. The JAR Group have the team to make you great, so all they ask is that you make them great. That's not too much to ask, is it?
So what does The JAR Groupwant you to do?
- Dive into their site
- Ask questions, they'll try to answer, but more importantly, they'll start an F.A.Q.
- Research
- Think of ways to engage them in conversation online or off (hey, they're always at Digital DUMBO Drink ups
- Get them to think
What do you get?
- You will join a great team
- You can create the role that you know should be created around search marketing leadership
- You will be part of the management team driving the future of an exciting agency
- They won't pay you like a first round draft choice, sorry, they're a start-up, but you will be paid well. In addition to a salary (job description speak- Salary Commensurate with Experience), you will be eligible for profit sharing (and yes, they make money). It is so important to The JAR Group that you make them money, they are willing to give a little bit back as part of your package.
If this sounds like something you, or your friends, would be interested in, let's start talking...
Salary Range: Unknown
Closing Date: Unknown
More Info From: http://www.thejargroup.com/create-your-own-search-marketing-job/
Contact: Please send resume and cover letter to jobs[at]thejargroup.com
To subscribe to our daily feed of search industry job vacancies, or to post your own job vacancy visit the Search Engine College Jobs Board.
Quote of the Month
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Albert Einstein
(1879 - 1955)
This Month's Sponsor: Proposal Kit
I never read banner ads. That's why I was surprised to find myself clicking on a banner the other day. The ad intrigued me because it offered to fulfill a pressing need I had.
Over the years, I had developed what I thought was a fairly slick proposal template for my search engine optimization business. But still the document lacked an edge. I knew I had lost a couple of recent pitches to my competitors and I wondered if there was something about their proposals that I was missing in mine.
The banner ad from Proposal Kit offered a solution to my problem. It advertised "Turn-key contract, estimating and proposal kits for today's Internet professional". That's exactly what I was looking for, so I clicked on the banner ad, fully expecting to find some ultra-hyped, over-rated, disappointing backyard software. Boy was I wrong!
Proposal Kit takes the chore out of creating and tailoring client estimates and proposal contracts. With over 200 pre-designed self-guiding templates ready to fill in the blanks with your company, project/product/service and client information, ProposalKit has already half completed your proposal for you.
Let Proposal Kit improve your professional image and help you close that sale. Today.
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FAQ 1: How can I check keyword rankings reliability?
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Dear Kalena
A client asked me to check results on about 30 of her company's list of search terms (breast augmentation L.A.; breast augmentation Beverly Hills; nose job L.A. etc. etc.)
Question: am I going to get reliable results by just typing those terms into a Google search box on my computer 90 miles away from the client and noting the SERPs?
Charles
Hi Charles
With Google Personalized Search, Google Social Search (see article this issue) and Universal Search thrown into the mix, these days the SERPs that one person sees may not be the same SERPs another person sees - even if they are located in the same room!
If your client wants to know specific rankings, make sure you are logged out of any Google accounts and then run the checks. It might be faster if you use an online rank checking tool - you can find these listed under the tools category at SearchEngineWiki.com or by running a Google search.
BUT, if I were you, I would run those search terms through keyword research tools to make sure your client is targeting the right terms in the first place. It might be that she is targeting terms that very few people type into search engines, OR terms that are too competitive for her to achieve high rankings. Your keyword research might pinpoint better choices for her.
Good luck!
FAQ 2: Are site wide footer links OK for SEO?
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Hey Kalena,
What are your thoughts on having links to other pages of my web site at the bottom of each of my web pages? Will this help or hurt our rankings? Is this a more outdated practice?
Hi Lisa,
Including Links within a site wide footer is a fairly common practice that has been around for a long time - and in fact has seen a bit of a resurgence in the designs of a lot of Web 2.0 sites.
Providing you are sensible in the use of these types of links they should help, rather than hurt your rankings. In many cases the footer provides a logical place to provide links to the main sections of your site - and also allows you to include search engine friendly text based (and keyword rich) anchor text.
Footer links can make it easier for users to navigate your site - without having to scroll back to the top of the page. However, I recommend that you use footer links in moderation - I suggest a maximum of a dozen or so. If there are too many (particularly if they are heavily keyword optimised) they can start to look spammy (to search engines as well as users) and may start to have a negative impact on rankings and conversions.
Google has also suggested that you should try and limit the number of links per page to a maximum of about 100. If you have a large number of links in your page footers this could become an issue.
As a general rule, if it's good for your users it will be good for search rankings. If you are thinking of doing anything to your site primarily for the benefit of the search engines rather than your users, then you should think long and hard before going ahead with it.
Andy Henderson
Ireckon Web Marketing |
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$50 Off Search Engine College Courses
Keen to learn SEO? Want to sharpen up your PPC skills? Been thinking about taking one of our Search Engine College courses but needed an extra incentive? Well here's your chance. Any newsletter subscriber that enrolls in the next 2 weeks gets $50 off the certification course/s of their choice.
That's right, a $50 discount on each and every individual certification course we offer*. But you must enroll via this link and follow the instructions on that page for applying the discount coupon at the checkout.
Happy studying!
* Not applicable to Certification Pathways bundled courses as they are heavily discounted already.
FAQ 3: Why aren't our franchisee websites being found in search results?
Hi Kalena,
I have just encountered something I am not sure about and I really need some advice on this. The site I am working on has the following issue;
It is a business with 100 franchises. The franchisees are complaining they do not come up in any searches. I have checked it and they don't. Not even when you type in their exact URL into the search engine.
The URL structure for the business's franchises work like this;
www.clientsite.com/studio/location (actual URL provided)
A related problem may be that there are 3 separate XML sitemaps:
- www.clientsite.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml
- www.clientsite.com/sitemap/location(Alpha)sitemap.xml
- www.clientsite.com/sitemap/location(postcodes)sitemap.xml
The first is their MAIN sitemap. The other two are sitemaps for all the locations of their franchises (100 in total) These locations and their URLS are not included in the MAIN sitemap. Is having multiple sitemaps detrimental to the SEO.?
Yen
Hi Yen,
You may be surprised, but this is a VERY common issue for franchise websites that are based on a template structure, and you'll realise that the reason the franchisee pages are not being found in search results is actually pretty simple... But first, I'll address your sitemap query.
Multiple Sitemaps
Using multiple sitemaps is not the problem here. If you do a search for site:clientsite.com in Google you will see that the pages in question are actually indexed - which means that the search engines have found and crawled them.
I think though that it is probably unnecessary for your site (with just a couple of thousand pages) to have multiple sitemaps. Multiple sitemaps are recommended (and in fact required) for very large sites, but there is a specific protocol involving a sitemaps index file (that you do not seem to be using). You can find out more about it, with clear instructions and examples on how to correctly use sitemaps at sitemaps.org.
So the issue with your site is not indexing - it is ranking. You don't specify what search queries you would hope/expect the pages to be found for, but for all the examples I tried, the franchisees pages did come up for a query of their business name itself - which is more evidence that the pages are indexed OK. From what I could see, all your franchisees seem to have a single page of content - based on a standard template, with just the business name and contact details changed. So in effect each franchisees page is one of 100 essentially "identical" pages on the site.
Website Templates
This is a clear issue of duplicate content which is very common for franchise sites based upon standard templates (which provide templated content rather than just the structure or design). In this instance, each franchisee has just a single page within the same root domain (1 of 100 almost identical pages), with relatively little keyword rich content, so I am not surprised (and neither should you be) that it does not rank at all for general keyword phrases. In fact if each franchisee had their own individual domains, with multiple pages of optimised keyword rich content - if they were based on the same template, they still would not rank any better.
I get asked about this type of issue a lot. Excited and enthusiastic new franchisees (and multi level marketers) have setup their website using a template provided by "the business" and pretty soon begin to wonder why the eagerly anticipated enquiries and sales aren't flooding in from their websites.
Quality, Keyword Rich, Unique Content
One of the very first things that most SEOs learn is that to get good rankings you need quality, keyword rich and UNIQUE content. Using a templated approach is clearly NOT a strategy you should follow to get unique content. For a graphic example try this search query : "incalculable numbers of real people" - which is snippet of text taken from a website template for a well known international "We are Not Multi Level Marketing" organisation (probably not the one you are thinking of).
The above, fairly specific, and you might expect, "unique" query returns over 40,000 results. Is it any wonder that most of these sites will never be found through organic search?
That's not to say that there is no value in these templated systems - many have been setup to very cleverly guide people through to the signup process - but if you "own" one of these sites you will need to use other methods to get traffic to it (PPC, Advertising, etc) and not rely on organic search traffic.
So Yen, back to your question... If your franchisees want to be found for generic keyword searches, I suggest that they register their own domains, and create their own unique, keyword rich content rather than depending on the corporate "template".
Andy Henderson
WebConsulting
FAQ 4: What SEO rules apply for ecommerce sites?
Hi Kalena
Could you please tell me if there are any special seo rules to keep in mind when developing or commissioning an ecommerce site?
Thanks
Natalie
Hi Natalie
It's hard to answer that question because every ecommerce site is different and presents its own challenges.
For example, if it is a large e-commerce site, it may be database driven, which means that product pages may contain session ids or multiple parameters that might confuse search engines. That would require a server-side solution of some kind.
It might offer thousands of products, meaning keyword research is a huge job and optimizing individual pages is extremely time consuming. That might require a script to integrate a meta tag / title tag template on every page.
It might be in a very competitive industry, meaning SEO of pages may not have much of an impact unless the site is hugely popular with very strong Google PR and backlinks.
I would say the most important thing you can do before SEOing an ecommerce site is RESEARCH. Your SEO Requirements Document will be crucial here, as will a very good dig into the site and the client company. To learn more about what should be included in your SEO Requirements Document, see my article: Before Launching Your SEO Campaign.
Learn as much as you can about the company, their customers, their goals and their target markets before you start any SEO activity.
Kalena
FAQ 5: SEO for main domains vs sub-domains?
Hi Kalena,
Hope you are doing great. I have a question regarding the importance of domain and subdomain in SEO. Should there be any difference in SEO approach while doing SEO of a sub domain and a main domain. If yes, what's that? Also, I have noticed that the probability of a sub domain to get ranked over top SERP on competitive keywords is quite low. I have not seen many sub domains in top 10 search results. So my second question is, if I have a website with main domain and other is with sub domain and I put same efforts on both websites. Will they rank same or main domain will have additional advantage?
Regards
Manish
Hi Manish,
As you are probably aware, in recent years it has become more difficult to dominate SERPs with a single domain. In the "good old days" it was possible to have multiple listings on page 1 (sometimes even 10), but these days this is (more or less) restricted to a maximum of 2 listings for the one domain. It is widely accepted that this restriction also applies to subdomains - i.e. you can only have 2 listings for the same root domain - whether or not they include subdomains - However, I have seen plenty of cases where this is not the case (see example below).
I agree that subdomains don't seem to show up as often in SERPs - but I believe that this is largely because they aren't as widely used, and (more importantly) aren't as widely linked to or as well optimised.
If a main domain and a subdomain have the same quality content, use the same optimisation strategies and have a similar backlink profile, I would expect them to achieve similar rankings.
And here is some evidence which I believe supports this - Try this Google query for the phrase "all aces gold coast" and you will hopefully (in these days of personalized SERPs) get results that show four separate page one listings the same domain.
I rest my case...
Andy Henderson
Ireckon Web Marketing
FAQ 6: What's the difference between free and paid keyword research tools?
Hi Kalena,
I have been looking into some free keyword research software and noticed there are a few out there; even Google's free tool has gotten good kudos.
In lesson four of the SEO 101 Course, you mention a few SEO tools that if we wanted we would have to eventually pay for - can you please let me know what the main differences are between the free and paid versions?
And if, I am just starting out in SEO and have a limited budget if the free versions will do what I need.
Thanks
Trina
Hi Trina
The main difference between paid and free keyword research tools is usually the number of keywords you can research. Also, some of the paid tools give you the ability to search specific databases e.g. Australia only or the last six months of search data versus the last five years of search data.
Our Search Engine Wiki has a pretty good list of keyword research tools. One great new tool I haven't added to the Wiki yet is iSpionage. It's particularly useful when researching target pay per click keywords for your AdWords campaigns, because it shows what your competitors are targeting.
Oh and try Raven Tools too. It's more of a holistic SEO tool but it has great keyword management functionality.
Kalena
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