The Google homepage is one of the most poorly search engine optimized websites on the Web. If you search for “search engine” (There are 6 million such searches every month.) then Google appears way down the list on the second page of search results. Alta Vista (the king of search engines in the mid-Nineties) appears third. Google is doing a lot wrong.

SEO experts from SEO Gold Coast tell their clients that Google loves content. Well, not on its own homepage it doesn’t. Last time I counted there were 39 words on the entire page, and not a single one of them contained the phrase “search engine”. It gets worse. If you look at the title tag for the Google homepage it says “Google”. That’s all. Just Google. That has got to be one of the worst title tags ever written.

In the world of search engine optimization, Yahoo is a much better homepage. It has hundreds of popular words and over a hundred links. Search engines just love Yahoo. So, why is Google so appalling at search engine optimization? They don’t need it, you might say. They’re Google. Yes, but Google wasn’t always a giant. It was started by two students and from the very beginning it had a really simple homepage.

So why is Google so successful? Because it understands one very important rule:

Bringing people through your website is more important than bringing people to it.

It is more important to focus on helping people complete the task they came to your website to complete than simply bringing lots of customers to your website.

The ultimate search engine optimization and marketing strategy is to try to help your customer complete their task quickly and easily on your website. In an age of social media, happy customers tell other customers. Happy customers are more likely to link to you.

Jill Whalen is one of the most sensible people you can listen to when it comes to search marketing. In a recent article she talked about the truly horrible practice of writing “SEO articles.” According to Jill there is a widespread belief that “writing keyword-stuffed articles is somehow an SEO requirement. They don’t know why they might need these articles — only that, for whatever reason, the Google Gods want them. And so they write articles that nobody would be interested in reading, but which are stuffed chock-full of the keywords for which they would like Google to show their site. And then they wonder why it’s not happening for them.”

Jill goes on to explain why writing purely for the search engine is such a bad idea. “If you were looking to buy Product Part A, which page would you rather find in Google? The one with the product part information, the price, choice of color/size, information on how to purchase it, and an ‘add to shopping cart’ button? Or the one that tells you the history of said product part?”

Always optimize for the searcher (the customer), not the search engine.

The Free Dictionary

I consider this to be one of the most valuable resources out there for keyword optimization. In addition to just showing you the meaning of a word, the dictionary also shows words of the same root and thesaurus entries. Use it to approach your keywords from more than one angle.

Google Trends
Google tends to make software that is easy to use, extremely helpful and best of all, completely free! Their Google Trends service is no exception. It analyzes Google search data and shows you how popular that search is over a period of time. and while they don’t claim to be 100% accurate, having a general idea of the popularity of your search terms will help you whittle down your SEO terms.

Google Blog
Add this blog to your regular blog roll now and thank me later!. These masters of SEO clearly know a thing or two about search. Learn tips, tricks and go behind the scenes with the geniuses behind the service that has taken the world by storm.

Keyword Discovery
This service is on the expensive side, but has some decently priced plans. If you need help with optimizing meta tags, beating out the competition or maximizing your PPC campaigns, Keyword Discovery can help.

Keyword Research FlowChart
Ever wonder how to determine if your SEO efforts will pay off. Use this flow chart to help navigate the SEO waters with easy to follow instructions each step of the way. Larger version and downloadable PDF available on the site.

Keyword Typo Generator
Enter your keyword of choice and then enter the type of error you want to search. Wrong key? Missed Characters? Double Characters? This keyword Typo Generator has them all covered.

Meta Glossary
Stop searching for your dusty physical copy of the Dictionary and start using MetaGlossary. They scour the internet to provide you with current definitions for any word you can imagine.

Ranks
From a company with 10 years of solid SEO experience, comes a great keyword density tool. Check to see what keywords your competitors are using and use the results to boost your business. This is a great resource!

SEO Workers Analysis Tool
Don’t know the ranking potential of your web page? This tool is a great one because it provides you with keywords, all urls located in the page, keywords found in anchor tags and more! And it analyzes not only meta tags but the same places internet spiders check as well to ensure all bases are covered.

SEO Tool Set
Multiple useful tools in one place make this site a go-to for anything SEM. From a SEM tool bar, a server checker (that lets you know if something in your server is erroneous) and competition research, you’ll find yourself using the resources on this site regularly.

Similpedia
As its name suggests, this site helps you find similar content on…you guessed it – Wikpedia. Just enter a URL or paragraph of 100 words and you’re given all of the wikipedia articles that are related to that content.

Tip of My Tongue
What was that word? It starts with Q and has an I in it…and an R, I think… No more guessing! Tip of My Tongue  Enter partial words, letters or meanings to get that word off the tip of your tongue and into your keyword cache.

Traffic Travis
Besides the fact that Traffic Travis was highly rated by CNET (4.5 stars), this program combines a bunch of useful tools: keyword and competition searches, your site’s ranking amongst the top four search engines, and a point-and-click advertisement tracker. Add all this to the fact that the layout is simple and the program is easy to use and Traffic Travis is an online marketer’s dream come true.

WordTracker
Has a free keyword suggestion tool. Known as the Grandfather of SEO sites, but they also have linkbuilder and strategizer tools. Perfect if you need continuous (versus sporadic) access, high level details about a niche, and a few projects at a time.

Which worked best for you? And would you add any more to the list?

GWT is a free toolset provided by Google that helps you first understand what’s going on with your website. This way you make decisions based off of data instead of going in blindly.

Here is how GWT works.

Adding your website

The first thing you need to do after you login to GWT (it’s free to sign up) is to add your website.

After you add your website you’ll have to verify that you actually own the website. You can do this through four ways:

Add a DNS record to your domain’s configuration – You can use this option if you can sign in to your domain registrar or hosting provider and add a new DNS record.
Add a meta tag to your sites homepage – You can choose this option if you can edit your site’s HTML.
Upload an HTML file to your server – You can choose this option if you can upload new files to your site.
Link your Google Analytics account to GWT – You can use this option if your site already has a Google Analytics tracking code that uses the asynchronous snippet. You must be an administrator on the analytics account for this to work.

Dashboard

Once your site is verified you’ll start seeing data on your website. Sometimes it can take a few hours before you see any data, but it’ll start rolling in.

The dashboard gives you a rough overview of everything from what keywords you are ranking for to how much traffic you are getting. In addition to that you’ll see if the Google bot is experiencing any crawl errors when going through your website, the number of sites linking to yours, and how many pages Google has indexed.

Site Configuration

Just like everything else, Google isn’t perfect. So configuring your site can help them do a better job of ranking your website. When configuring there are a few areas that you should be familiar with:

Sitemaps

Submitting a sitemap will help Google determine what pages you have on your website so they can index them. If you don’t submit a sitemap they may not index all of the pages on your website, which means you won’t get as much traffic.

Sitemaps have to be submitted in an XML format and they can’t contain more than 50,000 URLs or be larger than 10 megs. If you exceed any of those limits, you need to split up your sitemap in multiple files and then submit them.

If you aren’t technical, you can go to XML Sitemaps to create a sitemap. All you have to do is enter in your URL of your homepage and click “start”.

Once your sitemaps have been uploaded, Google will tell you how many of your URLs are being indexed. Don’t worry, it is common for them to not index all of your web pages. But your goal should still be to get as many pages indexed as possible.

Typically if pages aren’t being indexed it’s because the content on those pages aren’t unique, the title tags and meta descriptions are generic, and not enough websites are linking to your internal pages.

Crawler access

There will be some pages on your website that you just don’t want Google to index. This could be private login areas, RSS feeds, or crucial data that you don’t want people accessing.

By creating a robots.txt file you can block not just Google, but all search engines from accessing web pages that you don’t want them to get their hands on. However, for highly sensitive areas of your website you may want to consider password protecting all relevant directories.

Through the robots.txt generator and tester, not only will you be able to create a robots.txt file, but you will be able to see if it is done correctly before you upload it to your server. It’s wise to do because the last thing you want to do is make a mistake and tell them not to index your whole website.

And if you accidentally mess up and find Google indexing pages that you don’t want them to index, you can request them to remove it through this section.

Sitelinks

Sitelinks are links to a site’s interior pages displayed on a Google search results page. Not all sites have sitelinks, but as you grow in popularity you’ll naturally get them. Google generates these links automatically, but you can remove sitelinks you don’t want.

Through this section you can somewhat control what sitelinks show up when someone searches for your website. The reason you can’t fully control what pages show up here is that you can only block which pages you don’t want to appear, and you can’t pick which pages you want to appear.

Change of address

If you are looking to change the URL of your website, you better let Google know or else your traffic is going to decrease.

You can tell them through 4 easy steps:

• Setup the new site – You have to get the new domain up and running. Make sure all your content is available for the public to see.
• Redirect the old traffic – A 301 permanent redirect tells users and search engines that your site has permanently moved.
• Add your new site to GWT – Make sure you also verify your new website.
• Tell GWT your new domain – In the change of address section, you can select the new domain name of your website.

Settings

If your target audience is someone in a specific country, then you can select this option in GWT. For example if my target customer for XTmotion lives in the UK, I would then tell GWT that my target audience lives in the UK.

In addition to that you can select a preferred domain name. This is going to be http://yourdomain.com or http://www.yourdomain.com. Either one works, you just have to select which variation you prefer. The reason for picking one is that people may link to both versions of your domain and by selecting one Google will combine the links, which will help your rankings.

The last setting you should be worried about is crawl rate. If you feel that the Google bot needs to be crawling your website more often and faster then you can tell them to do so. Or you can just let them pick the crawl setting for your website. (this is typically the best option because if they crawl your website too often it can cause too much bot traffic going to your server and increase your hosting costs)

Your website on the web

Have you ever wondered how Google looks at your website? After all, it’s a search engine and not a human… so naturally it won’t be able to look at a website in the same way you do.

But luckily for you, through GWT you can see how Google views your website.

Search queries

Not only is it important to go after keywords that have high search volume, but it is important to make sure that you have a good click through rate.

By monitoring the search queries page, you can work on improving your click through rate so that people are more likely to click on your listing when they search. Typically you can do this by making your title tag and meta description more attractive as that is what people read before clicking through to your site.

Links to your website

The best way to increase your rankings on Google is to get more sites to link to you. Usually this happens naturally if your website is providing valuable information to potential customers.

A good way to monitor your link growth is to continually monitor this area in GWT. In addition to that, make sure you monitor which pages people are linking to.

If your links aren’t growing fast enough consider writing relevant linkbait that could be submitted throughout the social web. Getting on the homepage of Digg.com can drive thousands of new links to your site.

Keywords

You may have a good idea of what keywords you want to rank for, but that may not be consistent with what Google is ranking you for. Under the keywords section you can see what keywords your website is the most related to.

You can also see what variations of each keyword that are also relevant to your website. For example some people misspell keywords and you can find out which misspellings your website is most relevant for.

And if those aren’t the keywords you care to rank for, you can then use that data to adjust the content on your website.

Internal links

Linking your web pages together is a great way to get more Google love. For example, if you want your about page to rank for your company name make sure you link to it multiple times.

If you don’t link to your internal pages, they will not get as much PageRank and they won’t place as well in the search listings.

In addition to that, this data will also help you determine which pages Google feels is the most important. For example, if you look at the image above you’ll see that website owner felt that their about pages was one of the most important pages on their website. So naturally Google felt that as well.

Subscriber stats

If you have a blog, this area of GWT will be useful for you. If you don’t, it won’t.

Under the subscriber stats section you can see which of your blog posts are the most subscribed to by Google’s feed reader. You can then take that data and write more posts that are similar to your popular ones. And of course, you can stop writing blog posts similar to the ones that no one subscribed to, as readers probably didn’t enjoy them as much.

On a side note, if you want to track your RSS growth, you can also check out Feedburner, which will allow you to track how popular your feed is.

Diagnostics

Websites are made by humans, so don’t expect them to be perfect. Your code maybe a bit messed up, and even worse, your website may contain malware.

Through the diagnostics section, you can figure out what’s wrong with your site and how you can fix it.

Malware

If you have malware on your server, you should see a message here. If you don’t, GWT won’t show you much.

The reason it is important to not have malware on your server is that Google tries not to rank infected sites high because if someone goes to an infected site, their computer may get infected. If you do happen to have malware, make sure you clean it up.

Crawl errors

The crawl errors section will show you if there any problems that relate to your site on the web or on a mobile phone. The most common error that you’ll see is a 404 error, which means Google’s bot can’t find that page.

The most common reason that you’ll see 404 errors is because other websites sometimes link to pages that don’t exist on your website or used to exist.

What you need to do is get a list of all of the websites that are linking to dead pages on your site and hit them up. When emailing them, ask them if they can change that link to a valid page.

Or if you see a lot of people linking to a dead page on your site, you can always 301 redirect that old URL to the new URL.

Crawl stats

If you have thousands of pages on your site, then you should expect Google to crawl most of these pages on a daily or weekly basis. If they aren’t, then something is wrong.

Through the graphs and data tables that GWT provides, you should be able to get a good sense if they are crawling enough pages on your website. If they aren’t, consider adjusting the crawl rate under the settings tab.

HTML suggestions

When Googlebot crawls your site, it may find some issues with your content. These issues won’t prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but addressing them may help boost your traffic.

The most common problem is related to title tags and meta descriptions. If every page on your site has unique and detailed title tags and meta descriptions, you should be fine. At the same time, you also have to make sure your title tags aren’t too short or too long.

And if that isn’t the case, then you can go through the URLs that GWT tells you they have an issue with, and fix it.

Labs

GWT regularly tests new features out. The easiest way to find out about these new features is to go through the labs sections.

Fetch as Googlebot

With Fetch as Googlebot you can see exactly how a page appears to Google. All you have to do is type in a URL and GWT will tell if they could successful see it or not.

There currently isn’t a ton of data that GWT is showing in this area, but I expect this to change in the future.

Sidewiki

If you’re a webmaster, you can leave a special Sidewiki entry on pages of your site. You can choose to leave a master entry for the whole site, or create page specific entries to engage your visitors.

All you have to do is:

• If you’ve successfully validated your account in GWT, you will see an option to write as the page owner.
• Select the “Write as the page owner” checkbox in the entry form. If you’d like to leave a master entry across the whole site, also select the “Show this page owner entry on all pages…” checkbox.
• Click Publish.

Site performance

Your website’s load time is one of the most important things you should be monitoring. Every month you should be making sure you improve this number because if your website is too slow your Google traffic may drop.

Numerous website owners have seen a positive increase in their traffic by improving their website load time.

If you aren’t sure how fast your website should load, don’t worry. Google will tell you if your website is too slow or quick enough.

Video sitemaps

If you have video on your site, you want to make sure you include those raw video files in your sitemap. This way, Google can index them as they may not be able to find them otherwise.

This will help ensure that your videos are getting the traffic they deserve from Google video search.

If you are trying to create a video sitemap, this page should explain how to do so.

Conclusion

GWT is a useful tool that’s free. If you aren’t making use of it, you should start doing so now. The reason it’s worth using is because it will help guide you and tell you what to do if you want to improve your Google traffic.

Profiles

If you give users a self-serving reason to link to their profile, they will be much more likely to link to it. Turn the profile into a portfolio; use a member’s profile to show off their achievements and their top contributions to the site. Double up the incentive and enable members to be freelance through the site – have a “hire me” button on their profile. Something like this would work well for sponsorship, putting a “Sponsor Me” button bellow the name and profile shot of each athlete.

Sharing Call To Actions

While this is pretty basic, there are many sites that do not ask users to share their content in any visible way. This can be as simple as adding buttons to share the content in a ribbon at the end of content or in a sidebar. Be careful not to go overboard on the buttons though. While your users may be on many different networks, poppularity of these networks tends to follow the Pareto Principle, where 20% of networks receive 80% of your users’ submissions and attention.

Sharing your content doesn’t guarantee links as social links are often nofollowed, but social is thought, by some, to be a factor in the ranking algorithm so encouraging users to share shouldn’t be neglected.

Voting Content Helpful

Do you enable users to vote content up or down? What do you do with it after it’s been voted helpful? When a user votes something up, it means they think the content is good content but they may not be thinking of sharing. You can remind them with an async overlay that appears after voting up. This could easily become annoying, and cause people to stop voting content helpful so it might be a good idea to only do this only one out of every seven or ten times. An easier implementation of this is putting the Facebook “like” button on your site as “liking” content automatically publishes it to your wall.

Promote Controversial Content

Content that gets people riled up also has a tendancy to get a lot of links. Regardless of whether you write content as link bait, it can become link bait. If there are controversial threads on your site, promote them like crazy. Try and stir up that hornet’s nest and see what happens.

One really easy way to keep these threads/posts going is to promote the most active discussions in the sidebar or at the bottom of other threads. There are a lot of “top discussions” plugins that will highlight content so that you don’t have to worry about manually promoting controversial content. That said, if you do notice controversial content, it would probably be smart to promote it in other ways such on Twitter.

Awesome Community Badges

If you have a strong community that loves you, create badges for the community and make a big deal out of them when you release them. Sometimes you can get multiple links out out these badges, but you need to be really careful about how you go about this. I would suggest reading the Unofficial Google Widget Bait Guidelines and Widgetbait Gone Wild.

Ego Boosting User Centric Badges

In addition to creating badges highlighting the community, you should create badges that are focused on the users and their achievements. This will play to the ego of your community members so these badges should really hype up how awesome your users are. Give your users the ability to “level up” and then graphically distinguish between levels of users on the badges; this gives users a) pride in their accomplishments and b) motivation to contribute more to the community.

Email Users at Critical Points

What the critical points of interaction for your site? When a users registers, contributes content, “levels up”, when the user’s content is voted up, and when users’ content is promoted by staff are some of critical action points that many community sites have in common. Identify which points of contact are critical for your site, then email users at these points and ask them to share either the site or what they have just done. For example, if a user’s review is going to be promoted on the front page or on a popular category page, email the user and let them know that they created something great and that their review is going to be promoted. Encourage the user to tell their friends about their review being promoted on the homepage.

When users register, collect their Twitter names. When their content is being promoted, as in the situation above, you should tweet about it.

Embed Photos

Like videos, photos are shared frequently; the catch is that most sites that host their own videos offer you the ability to embed the video. Most sites that offer photo galleries don’t offer this option.  There are so many opportunities to leverage embedded content, most sites could find a way to build links through embedding content.

Create a Leaderboard

Stroke your top contributors’ egos a bit; dedicate a page to your top users and make sure they know about it so that they can promote it on their own blogs. While a lot of sites do this, I think Medpedia Answers does an especially good job. They provide the avatar and name of the contributor, how many point they have, qualifications and accomplishments, and they link to each members profile and another page with their answers. Medpedia, a medical Q&A site has done a good job recognizing their top users, below is part of their leaderboard.

Creating a leaderboard can help you get links, but people might not think to link to it on their own, but with a little encouragement…it could become awesome. When users make it onto this list, they should be informed that they made it on to the list of top contributors. Email them. They can again be notified once they have cracked the top 10, top 5, and 1st place. In the notification email, give them the URL and tell them they should share it with their friends. You could also include a special badge for top contributors (with a rank number) that communicates their accomplishment. Leaderbeard, Email, Sharing, Badges.

Interview Top Users

The key to interviewing members is to promote it well. If you prominently position the interview on the site, the contributor will be more likely to feel a sense of accomplishment about the interview, as the article will inherently get more attention because of its prominence. Since they feel proud of their interview, the user is likely to blog about the interview (maybe having an active blog could be a screening requirement for choosing interviewees).

Interviewing experts is often a way to get links as these experts will want to mention these interviews either on their blog or on Twitter. Take this concept and apply it to your users with blogs and strong social media accounts.

What is really important is to always publish interviews to the same URL and make sure that this is the URL that you share with the user, for example: domain.com/user-interview/. When you have a new interview to publish, simply move the old interview to a different location (domain.com/user-interview/username-date.html) and keep the links concentrated on the interview page.

Syndicate Your Content

There are a lot of sites that are hungry for content and would be willing to feature some of your content with an attribution link. If there is a popular news site in your industry, you could ask them if they would be interested in featuring a weekly article, review, blog, photo… that they could feature on their site. Make sure you get attribution links out of it though. An example of a good attribution line would be: How to Make Websites (link) is part of a weekly series by XTmotion (link).

To get users to syndicate your content, offer them custom widgets that could be easily placed on their site or blog. The widget could highlight their recent contributions to the community. This widget would act like an RSS feed that would sit in a user’s sidebar. This Whiteboard Friday is a good resource if you are looking to learn more about syndicating content.

Ask Your Community to Help Grow the Site

If you have a strong bond with your community, explain the basics of SEO to them and ask them to help you out. You can ask them to link to your site and share the content through social media. If you are feeling bold, you can even ask them to link to you using your keywords as anchor text. It is really important when you are directly asking your community to help you with SEO is that you emphasize how this will help the community and how it will help the user who links to the site. Etsy does a great job of explaining what SEO is and how their community members can help to optimize their contributions.

Having a page about helping a new site grow isn’t that uncommon. On these pages, sites will often ask users to link to the community and offer the user badges they can put on their site to show their support.

While not all of the strategies herewill work great for every site, there should be at least a few that will work for most sites. I hope you are able to apply some of these and have your community bear some of your link building burden. How do you get your community to build links for you? Let me know in the comments.

A Google Sitemap is, essentially, an XML file that contains information on all the web pages in your site. You create this file, submit it to Google, and Google will read it. What Google does from there nobody really knows. You can specify certain parameters in the file such as the location (URL) of your web pages, when they were last modified, how often the pages are updated, and what each page’s “priority” is.

Perhaps Google is relegating these Sitemap submitted results to a secondary index where they compare the results to their live index. This might let them know how people use (and abuse) the program. It is my opinion that the vast majority of participants in this program are website designers and marketers who are trying to give their clients a teenie-weenie leg up on the competition within Google. That’s not to say that there isn’t any value, though.

It is possible that by telling Google where all of your web pages are you can improve your web page saturation in their index. This may indirectly improve your rankings by getting an unlinked or deeply linked page into the index that wasn’t previously there. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s difficult to know if Google is even using Sitemap information in their live index.

So now that you’ve decided that you want to create and submit a Sitemap of your own, here’s how:

1. Firstly, you need to create your XML file. Don’t bother doing it yourself. There is an excellent free online utility at www.sitemapbuilder.net I tend to use Inspyder Sitemap Ceator.

2. You must now submit the Sitemap to Google. Visit Google and login with your Google account. Don’t have one? Don’t worry – that’s free, too. Once you’ve logged in you can add as many Sitemaps as you like.

3. Don’t forget – whenever you update your website (by adding, removing or relocating web pages) be sure to repeat this process. You won’t need to resubmit your sitemap to Google, though.

To see a sitemap just add /sitemap.xml at the end of any root URL.

Google also has a Mobile Sitemap program. I will write on the mobile web sitemap as well as video sitemaps in a future post.

But today Google has announced Cloud Connect for the Google Search Appliance, promising to bring about a more comprehensive search tool for on-premise and cloud-based content, all from within a single search box.

Did you know that between January and June 2010, the US government made 4,287 requests for data disclosure from Google?

During the same period, it asked for 678 items to be removed. Similarly, Brazil made 2,435 data requests and asked for 19,806 items to be removed.

The “Big Brother” statistics are available from Google’s Transparency Report. The figures have been collated from the search engine and other services such as YouTube. Google states:

Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services. We also receive requests for information about the users of our services and products from government agencies like local and federal police. The map shows the number of requests that we received in six-month blocks with certain limitations.

Google admit the figures are not wholly accurate. Fewer than 10 requests are not shown and 2 requests for the same item could be counted twice. You can click any map marker for details such as how many requests Google complied with.

The figures include removal demands for alleged defamation, hate speech, and impersonation. However, the numbers do not include:

Illegal pornography — Google identifies and removes it when they become aware of the issue. This occurs regardless of government involvement.

Removal of copyrighted content — this tends to originate from the private sector and government demands are negligible.

Numbers for China — the Chinese government consider censorship requests to be state secrets in themselves.

You should note that demands are relatively higher in Brazil and India owing to the popularity of Orkut, Google’s own social networking site. Germany also bans Nazi memorabilia and some content while Korea requests removal of RRN social security numbers.

Criminal investigations account for many of the requests. These have increased annually as Google’s products, services and user base has grown.

There are few details about the other demands, but it’s clear Google isn’t afraid to report government censorship:

At a time when increasing numbers of governments are trying to regulate the free flow of information on the Internet, we hope this tool will shine some light on the scale and scope of government requests to censor information or obtain user data around the globe — and we welcome external debates about these issues that we grapple with internally on a daily basis.

The Transparency Report raises an interesting debate. On the plus side, the web is enabling a global democracy where governments are increasingly unable to hide information from the people they serve. On the flip side, is this a sign that Google has become too powerful? Can it threaten regulatory authorities, rise above the laws of the countries it operates in and enforce it’s own moral charter?

Craig Buckler

In the last couple of weeks, Google has tacitly launched Google Instant, an enhancement to the Google SERPS user interface where the SERP updates dynamically to show results as the user types search terms.

The effect is that searchers will see results more quickly than before (where searchers would have traditionally either clicked the search button or the “enter” key).

Currently, Google Instant is only available to Google account holders, but no doubt it’ll be rolled out across all users in time.

The question on the lips of digital marketers is: how will Google Instant affect SEO and PPC performance. The possible effects on metrics and measurement, brand and content strategy need to be taken into consideration.

Impression metrics according to Google

Let’s just talk about metrics first. According to Google, they will only record an impression in the following situations:

• The user begins to type a query and then clicks anywhere on the page
• The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter or selecting one of the predicted queries
• The user stops typing and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds

PPC Performance

1. Impact on Quality Score

From a Google AdWords performance perspective, Google’s definition of an impression should in theory mean that Quality Score wont be negatively affected on the occasions where searchers change their search term rapidly. However, the question begs, how many of us dwell for longer than 3 seconds when searching; or click “enter” or the search button by default? And will the effect of Google Instant change our behaviour requiring us to search less than before?

2. Listing position strategy – which position will perform best?

Aside from Quality Score implications, my feeling is that the first three ads (appearing in the box directly above the organic results) will most likely get more attention than they may have had in the past. This could mean that traditional ad positions such as 4 and 5 – that were often cited as the most efficient in terms of CTR and conversion rate – may lose their popularity in favour of ad positions 1 – 3. Only time will tell!

If this is the case, our keyword CPCs will need to increase – or respective keyword Quality Score will need to increase to improve our listing position.

SEO Performance

1. More impressions – lower CTR

The first thing that springs to mind is, will I get more impressions as the number of SERPS presented to searchers increases. The answer is most likely, yes.

Google has kindly illustrated this as we can see on the left.

But what about SERP click-through rates (CTR)?

If we see a drop in CTR for each of our keyphrases, this could impact on our SEO performance. Again, back to Google’s definition of an impression: if searchers don’t click on the screen, refresh their query before 3 seconds is up, or don’t click “enter” or “search”, then in theory no impression will be recorded.

But given that even Google estimate impressions will increase, the chances are strong that CTRs will indeed decrease.

Once again, time will tell.

2. The decline of the long tail?

As searchers type in search terms, the dynamic and instant results are likely to prevent us from searching long tail. Not only does the screen distract us, but the constant nature of being spoon-fed results may well make us less interested in long tail searches.

If this is the case, we may need to rethink our content strategy and focus more on the first two or three words in a phrase as opposed to qualifiers that make up long tail phrases.

As Microsoft pointed out with the launch of Bing, only one query in four is successful and hits the nail on the head first time round; this may well be set to change as Google Instant gives us more instant feedback.

3. Bigger brands will benefit

What about the brand effect with Google Instant?

Many SEO consultants have already hinted that big brands that are more likely to rank well with single short tail search terms – branded or not – will get more exposure. So, whether I’m searching for “apple” or “hotels”, the bigger brands with the higher search rank will receive impressions as the searcher types the initial part of a search term.

Furthermore, even if searchers do make it to a long tail search term, the top half of the SERP – often dominated by bigger brands – is likely to receive even more attention.