Uba Kontrovasie

Google going Social

I suppose none of us have been oblivious to the birth of Google Search Wiki in recent weeks, I’ve already heard lot’s of people say “hang on a sec, it’s not really a wiki”.

Search Wiki at the moment serves a purpose for Google account holders, who want to annotate, customize and improve the quality of their own search results pages.

I personally think Google might have bigger plans for Search Wiki as they may; over time use Search Wiki annotations and amendments collectively, as a means to improve the quality of their overall search results.

Google already have a very firm stance on aggressive link building activity, especially towards paid-for back links. Search Wiki along with other sources of internal data may, in the near future reduce Google’s dependance on analysing back link portfolios in order to judge website authority and relevancy.

The natural search results of Google are often just as manipulated as the sponsored search listings that advertisers use, It’s about time Google did some thing to clean up their search results. I’m sure Search Wiki will be warmly received by Google account holders, who in time will become self-motivated, vigilantly search Police.

It’s a real early warning for old school SEO practitioners that need to wake up and smell the coffee! Delivering good website structure, amazing content and excellent user experience will stop the public from deleting you from their search results.

Friendly Friends

In addition to Search Wiki, Google has also launched Friend Connect. With a quick copy and paste of code any website can now have “social” features. The ease of use makes Friend Connect a great quick win for any webmaster that wants social features on their website at minimum cost.

In addition to the simplicity of the installation, Friend Connect also allows people to join website groups using non-Google ID systems, such as Open ID and Yahoo ID. This is not only handy for users, it is also handy for Google as it increases the amount of people using their products and services.

Further to the points I raised above about Search Wiki annotations and amendments effecting natural search results, will the most socially active websites gain greater authority or improved rankings in the future? It does make sense to some degree as there are newer, UGC heavy websites on the web, which are more useful than top ranking websites that rank well because of their link equity.

Tags: friend connect, Google, improving search, search wiki, social media, social search

Thinking about who reads your content

I remember studying an e-learning module at University during my final year, it involved learning about different learning styles and the psychology behind learning.

One of the learning theories we covered was called VARK learning styles by Flemming and Mills.

The theory outlined four main types of learning style/persona:

- Visual
People who are visually stimulated learn more effectively through images and videos
- Auditory
Learning through sound based mediums such as lectures, music etc
- Read/Write
People who learn most effectively through reading and writing
- Kinesthetic
Learning via vocation or “doing”

Some of my day to day work involves content consulting and advising clients how, what and where to place content on their websites. One key person I always keep in mind is the reader.

If we refer back to VARK we can see four distinct personalities, it is therefore important to identify how your website and its content will cater for these personalities.

Some will argue that a lot of this is hard to determine without quantitive and qualitative research, however, stepping back and using a common sense approach can sometimes be quite effective.

Take an insurance company for example: they could publish online information about their policies in so many ways, some people (including me admittedly) are lazy about the reading the small print so why not publish it onto a video as an alternative?

A couple of years ago I was working on a project with the Beeb for children, it allowed me to gain an insight into how they were teaching children in a Kinesthetic manner, through games and learning tools. The project seemed to take into account the attention spans of their audiences (children) and then provide them with learning tools, which kept them engaged through participation.

So what’s the moral of my story? People absorb information in different ways, the Read/Write types just want the facts and the text, whilst others will prefer different mediums. It is important to make sure the core pieces of content on your website cater all types of learning style/persona.

The easier you make it for people to learn about your brand and it’s offerings, the faster they will understand what your brand has to offer.

(Just chucking it out there… I’m no UE expert, just thinking aloud)

Tags: content optimisation, content planning, elearning, VARK

Benefits of Microblogging - A real world example

Microblogging has so many versatile marketing uses, however, clients question why they should use microblogs and what are the real benefits?

I could probably sit here and write 10 or more obvious reasons, however, one of the most important reasons has to be search engine visibility…I will lend you my real world example:

I bought a lovely pair of Nike Vomero 3 running shoes two weeks ago and ever since I have been busy putting them through their paces. As I have been so happy with them I decided to do a few searches in order to see what other people had to say about them.

As soon as I queried “Nike Vomero3” a twitter tweet ranked No.2 (Google UK & No.1 Google UK (UK)) providing a good review of the shoe. So there we are, there’s the head smacker…search engine visibility!

Not only are microblogs social media platforms which syndicate information, facilitate conversation and enable community building; they are also capable of providing good search engine visibility over time. This is something that many DR centric brands will value.

Tags: DR, Micro Blogging, microblog, social media, tweet, Twitter

The Google Social Graph and beyond

Referring back to my earlier post about The Semantic Web, I mentioned that new build projects should utilise things such as Microformats and RDF.

One of the main reasons for this was to provide people with better usability of social networks, enabling them to find existing friends easily on new social platforms and facilitate portable, reusable online profiles, portable social networks and consolidated identities. The Google Social Graph aims to address this by taking note of XFN and FOAF markup within pages indexed by Google Search.

The data is being made available by Google for developers via the The Social Graph API, all interesting stuff and now it seems they are also paying more attention to the hCard Microformat too. Good post on this by Frederic Lardinois on Readwriteweb if you want to dig deeper.

I think the most important thing to note here is that Google are evidently paying more attention to semantic markup and it will not be long before other Microformats in addition to XFN and hCard are noted and effectively used by Google.

Ahem, I smell the possibility of Google Review Search on the horizon

Tags: foaf, Google, google social graph, microformats, rdf, Semantic web, social media optimisation, xfn

Act like you deserve your top spot in Google!

Modern approaches to NSO (post meta keyword stuffing) encompass many overlapping disciplines such as PR, User Experience (UE) and good design.

So many people in the SEO field (client side web-masters especially) fail to take note of the UE side of well…UE!

Accessibility always seems to get taken into account as this is something which can be partly remedied by good use of semantic HTML, CSS and things such as skip links, access keys and legends around forms.

Website IA (information architecture) from an NSO perspective is also another factor which gets ticked in the NSO check list. The one trick that many web-masters miss (intentionally most of the time) is thinking about what content users want to see.

If you’re not providing your users with good content then you are essentially delivering a bad  user experience.

I was recently carrying out some searches in Google for a clients research document and I queried “used car kent”. You only have to click on the top three search results in order to see that the quality of information being delivered is quite poor.

Try the search yourself (Google UK).

The top three results contained pages full of links and search forms with accompanying content that was keyword rich and not very informative.

Serving your users with weak content is not innovative use of a good rankings and I guess if we had access to their analytics packages we would see high bounce rates from Google traffic.

So who is doing a good job? Off the top of my head I would say Amazon, I did a search for “brand planning book” and they came up in position one with a landing page which, had the exact item I was looking for and alternative books with user reviews.

All in all a positive UE for Amazon users. Amazon may slip up on other aspects of UE as I am no UE expert, however I believe the basics are in place as the content they serve website visitors is essentially useful! Surprise, Surprise!

The natural search landscape is becoming more competitive YOY as YOY CPC inflation on paid search hits clients harder. Websites who have dominated natural search results for years should now invest in innovative content strategies in order to keep their rankings and better convert/retain the traffic they receive.

Tags: Amazon, car kent, client side web-masters, content, Google, Google UK, HTML, natural search landscape, Natural Search Optimisation (NSO), natural search results, paid search, search forms, search results, UE, web-masters

Google indexing flash, what will this mean for accessibility?

Google are indexing flash, the news most designers have been waiting for! Flash has always been a harder sell for the pure designer types who build flash heavy websites and do not take the search engine spiders into account.

How will flash based sites rank within search engines in comparision to semantically optimised websites? With any luck the semantically optimised websites will still take precedence over flash sites as they adhere to best practice coding which takes accessibility and all types of users and browsers in to account.

The inclusion of flash content in Google’s index will also mean that another can of spam worms will get opened as the black hats out there will look at new ways to manipulate flash for better rankings.

Realistically I think flash heavy sites do not cater for universal accessibility and they should sit below websites in the SERP’s which do so. Microsoft’s acquisition of Powerset a semantic search engine is further indication that search engines are starting to pay more attention to semantically optimised websites.

We hope search engines still stay more favorable towards websites who use W3C technologies and semantic coding as opposed to non-W3C formats.

Tags: accessibility, flash, Google, Microsoft, Natural Search Optimisation (NSO), Powerset, search engine, search engine spiders, search engines, semantic search engine, Semantic web, W3C technologies