The Digital Lookout

The undoubted arrival of personalised search restults and the convergence of different medias as described below with google universal search are going to make things a little complicated moving forward!

Optimising your website for the search engines is one thing, but judging and allowing for the impact of all different forms of media is another. maps, images, videos, retail listings, definitions, reviews, they are all going to become part of a SERP in the future and in order to fully make the most of “search” you will need a presence in as many as possible.

On top of this you have the advent of personalisation which is going to mean one individual could see completely different search results from the next! How do you optimise for this? In theory if you have a well optimised and targetted site you should be ok, because you generate the interest in the first place and so “stick” in the results for that person. If this is the case then it will mean a well optimised site holds more benefits for a much longer period of time.

A shake up is one the cards!

Optimizing Content for Universal Search
By Claudia Bruemmer (c) 2007
By now, you’ve all heard about Google’s new Universal Search concept, which combines all the information within its vertical databases into one index to serve a single set of Web search results. As you can imagine, this will require some adjustments to standard search engine optimization techniques. If you have been following the Bruce Clay methodology, then you should already be on the right track to optimizing every aspect of your Web site that is under your control. With the arrival of universal search, it’s not just a good idea; it’s a necessity.
Google Vice President of Search Products and User Experience Marissa Mayer said the company’s goal for universal search is to create “a seamless, integrated experience to get users the best answers.” Mayer stated on the official Google blog that the universal search vision would be “one of the biggest architectural, ranking, and interface challenges” the search engine would face.
Mayer first suggested this concept to Google back in 2001. Since then, the company has been building the infrastructure, algorithms and presentation mechanisms needed to blend the different content from Images, Video, News, Maps, Blogs et al into its Web results. This is Google’s first step toward removing the partition that separates its numerous search silos, integrating these vast repositories of information into a universal set of search results. The object is to make queries more relevant for users, but what are the ramifications for SEO?
Google Relevancy Challenge
Based on industry research, Google has a relevancy problem because the database is too vast. Back in 2005, Jupiter Research touched on this, stating it identified an opportuníty for vertical search engines. The study inferred that general search engines were good at classifying vast amounts of information, but not very good at serving results that helped users make decisions.
A year later, Outsell came out with “Vertical Search Delivers What Big Search Engines Miss,” a study that also mentioned the opportuníty for vertical search due to dissatisfaction with general search engines. This report published the oft-quoted fact stating that the average Internet search failure rate is 31.9 percent. The study identified two market trends contributing to the growth of vertical search – failed general searches and rising keyword prices in paid search.
Another noteworthy study was conducted by Convera. Over 1,000 online business users were asked about their search practices, successes, and failures. Only 21 percent of the respondents thought that search queries on general search engines were understood, a mere 10 percent found critical information on the first try in general search engines. This study concluded, “To date, professionals have not been adequately served by consumer search engines.”
The results of these studies show that Google and other general search engines are challenged to produce relevant results, suggesting vertical and niche search engines could eliminate such problems because the niche databases contain topic-specific information, serving targeted, more relevant answers to user queries.
Google’s Solution to Relevancy
Since Google’s move toward universal search, one can only assume it has considered the above problems and decided that pulling all its databases together, comparing and ranking them accurately at warp speed, could be the solution to relevancy. Doing this requires new technical infrastructure, including new algorithms, software and hardware, which Google has been working on since 2001 and is now in the process of implementing. Universal search has implications for search marketers because it is a departure from the uniformity that characterized search marketing in the past, requiring adjustments in SEO methodology. Since the modifications will be implemented in steps, immediate changes in the SERPS won’t be obvious, and there is time to develop new optimization strategies.
Search Personalization
In addition to universal search, Google is also focusing on personalization in the SERPs. This means users will be seeing different SERPS based on their previous queries, if signed into their Google accounts. Users may or may not notice many changes in the SERPs due to universal search and personalization, depending on their level of sophistication and/or powers of observation. However, marketers will be scrambling. Marketers will need to get their clients listed into as many niche databases as possible to íncrease the breadth of coverage for universal search. Social media optimization techniques can be used to enhance both universal and personalized search results.
Universal Search Optimization Strategies
The focus on personalization and universal search requires more emphasis on social media SEO strategies because of user interest in creating content and the vast amounts of new multimedia content created daily on the Web. Marketers are beginning to drive traffíc via social networking sites, and these efforts are known to enhance search engine optimization campaigns. Strategies include creating multimedia content such as blogs, videos and podcasts, and then getting them listed on social search sites like Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, as well as niche search engines like Technorati, Podzinger and Blinx.
When creating multimedia content, you must ensure that it is tagged and cataloged correctly. Multimedia content is optimized through established fundamental SEO techniques, such as creating keyword-rich, user-friendly content, unique Meta tags, good site navigation and structure, and implementing a successful linking strategy. Below are a few suggestions for creating and submitting multimedia content for several of Google’s vertical databases to gain extended reach through universal search.
Google Image Search: It has always been a good idea to use images on your site for illustrating your products and services. Now, this becomes a way for your customers to find your site via Google Image Search. Optimize your images with descriptive, keyword-rich file names and ALT tags. Use accurate descriptions of your image files for the benefit of the vision impaired and others who might need to view the site with text only.
Google Video (beta): As with optimizing images, use descriptive, keyword-rich file names for your video files. Also create a keyword-rich title tag, description tag, and video site map. Create a Web page to launch your video, optimizing content for SEO and using anchor text wherever possible. Besides submitting to Google Video, also include Blinkx and other social networking and search sites like YouTube and Podzinger (audio and video search engine).
Google News: Here’s where you can submit your press releases for display as “news” and subsequent indexing. Issue press releases containing current information about new products and events your site is involved with and Google News will likely pick it up.
Google Maps: This is also known as Google Local, a vertical that has been included in Google search results for a while. Give your site a local presence through the Google Maps Local Business Center where local businesses can get a frëe basic listing to extend their reach in the SERPs.
Google Blog Search (beta): You all have a corporate blog, right? This is how modern companies communicate with their customers and stakeholders. Tag it (digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, etc.), submit to Google Blog search, and extend your reach for Web searches on Google.
In closing, there are many ways social and multimedia content can enhance your SEO efforts. Experiment and learn how to use social media to extend your SEO rankings. As you become aware of the many niche databases for submitting multimedia content, this can go a long way toward gaining visibility through Google’s personalized and universal search.

Google’s Gargantuan Footprint
by Gord Hotchkiss, Thursday, April 5, 2007

A RECENT blog post by Anil Batra, formerly from Revenue Science, speculates that Google will soon be getting into behavioral targeting. Another post by A-list blogger Robert Scoble indicates that Google may be dialing down the presentation of sponsored ads for certain queries. Combine this with a few conversations I’ve had recently with Googlers, and it seems the company is already setting its sights beyond the search results page when it comes to revenue generation. One starts to get a sense of the footprint that Google is planning to put down on the future online landscape.
Getting Personal, One User at a Time
To me, the glue that holds all this together is Google’s move towards personalization. If the company can get that piece of the puzzle right, everything else falls into place behind it. And personalization moves Google beyond search into a lot of other applicable areas: the Google homepage, G-mail, Google News, desktop gadgets, to name just a few.
One of the issues I have with Google’s move towards personalization is that it stops short of really providing additional value to the average user. If personalization works well, it significantly enhances our search experience by providing relevancy unique to us. The signals that Google is watching to power the personalization algorithm are very much the same ones it would need to watch to introduce behavioral targeting of advertising messages. It’s all about the sites that people visit, the search results that they click on and the path they take online. If Google can use all these signals to help enhance the search results, it’s not that big a leap to be able to target messaging through its AdSense network on the sites you visit.
Google Everywhere You Turn
The key to all this for Google is ubiquity online. It need to be everywhere and it’s rapidly approaching that goal. While the pick-up on things like Gmail may not have been the runaway success that everyone was expecting, Google is beginning to offer enough online touch points to provide continuous interaction opportunities for any given individual prospect. Consider the touch points Google already controls. First, three out of every five searches that are launched online, anywhere, happen on Google, according to Hitwise. That’s 60% of hundreds of millions of searches daily, and that alone gives Google a virtual vice grip on the traffic channels of the Internet.
Next is Google’s AdSense network. Although it has not publicly disclosed how many sites are in this network, it’s estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
And then there’s Google’s toolbar. In a recent survey we found that about 42% of the participants we interviewed had the Google toolbar installed. In its full implementation, it tracks every single site you visit and streams this information back to Google servers somewhere.
Add to this the various other Google properties and tools you may interact with. This could include Gmail or a Google personal homepage, Google gadgets installed on your desktop, Google Checkout, Google Blog Reader, to name just a few. And that list keeps growing.
Finally, there’s Google analytics. One of the smartest moves that Google has done is introduce Google Analytics as a backend tool, free to Webmasters. The question is, why would Google offer a fairly robust analytics package free? The answer is that it gives the company a tremendous amount of data on the backend to supplement what it’s already collecting on the front end through click stream tracking. This closes the loop, giving Google two views of a massive dataset and allowing extrapolation from those two views.
BT High on Advertisers’ Wish List
When you add all these touch points together, you have the capability of driving the largest consumer-centric behavioral network in existence. And there’s an appetite for this ability to pinpoint precisely. In the last SEMPO market survey, advertisers indicated that behavioral targeting was their preferred option, with 78% of them willing to pay a premium for it. If you could offer advertisers the ability to present progressive messaging, tied to consumers’ movement through the buying cycle, with the ability to intercept them not just at the search results page but at various information sites where they would be gathering more information, you would have an extremely effective net in which to capture prospects.
The challenge for Google is to present behaviorally targeted advertising in a way that doesn’t impact the user experience. And this is likely the only sticking point standing between the search engine and the more aggressive rollout of behavioral targeting for advertisers. My suspicion is that work is currently underway on the technologies that would allow Google to always present the right message at the right time to the right person. There is a distinct danger in trying to push that too soon. It’s one of those things you have to get at least 70% right out of the gate. But if Google can do this, it’s a distinct win both for advertisers and consumers. We don’t mind advertising when it’s relevant to our needs. We only hate the stuff that gets in our way and keeps us from doing what it is we want to do.
Why Google Can Afford to Dial Back Search Ads
And this brings us to why Google can afford to experiment with dialing back the presentation of sponsored ads on the search results page. A few conversations with different Googlers seem to indicate that its future focus is definitely on the advertising network, rather than the search results page. If it can get the right message/right place/right time/right person equation nailed down, it can monetize traffic much more efficiently and further improve the user experience.
The key for Google, at least on the search results page, is keeping that top-of-page real estate highly relevant. The fact is, over 50% of all the clicks on the page are going to happen on the first three or four listings, whether they’re sponsored or organic. Another fact is that we don’t mind a mix of highly relevant sponsored and organic links at the top of the page, but we do mind having nothing but sponsored ads in the top four Golden Triangle locations. Our tolerance for this advertising drops like a rock with the lessening of relevance in the ads presented. If personalization and behavioral targeting would allow Google to further tweak the relevance of these ads and get it right more often, the monetization naturally jumps dramatically.
In our last eye tracking study we found that Google was the most efficient at monetizing traffic to the search results page in the long term. Although Microsoft and Yahoo were more aggressive in presenting ads in the top real estate, Google managed to maintain its click-through rates on both first time and subsequent visits to the same page of results.
Given the possible paths that Google could pursue (and the huge revenue-producing opportunities that lie down those paths) perhaps its mission statement should change from organizing the world’s information to always presenting prospects with the right marketing message at the right time. This certainly aligns better with its recent moves into every marketing channel imaginable.

Excellent articel highlighted the impact of personalisation of search on the SEO market place. Come interesting observations I had not before considered.

The Impact ofPersonalization on SEO
By Claudia Bruemmer

Personalization of search has been a growing topic of interest for a while, but has stayed under the radar for most people until now. With Google’s widespread integration of personalization into standard search results, search marketers’ attention has finally been firmly riveted on the issue. Up until recently, Google provided two personalization options:
You could customize your Google Personalized Homepage for quick access to information of your choice (email messages, news headlines, etc.).
You could get automatic personalization from your search history.
Major Changes at SiteProNews: The SiteProNews website no longer reflects the content of the SiteProNews newsletter. The website has a completely new look, provides keyword and category search and offers more article content as well as dynamically changing webmaster blog and news feeds. New features and sections will be added in the coming weeks. Be sure to visit and bookmark the new SiteProNews website.
Recently, Google started combining the above two options for users who sign up for services through their Google accounts. When you sign in, you get access to tailored results utilizing information from your search history and your Google home page. If you don’t wish to see results based on your past searches, you simply sign out of your Google Account or turn the option to track your history off in your Account settings.
To quote Danny Sullivan, “…anyone who signs-up for any Google service using a Google Account (such as Gmail, AdSense, Google Analytics among others) will automatically be enrolled into three additional Google products: Search History — Personalized Search — Personalized Homepage.” In the past, Google Accounts required you to manually enable Search History. However, with the recent change, personalized search has been enabled for all accounts, new and old alike. All accounts also automatically get home pages generated based on account information.
Widespread Personalization
We don’t know for sure how rapidly search personalization will take hold. However, a 2006 Choice Stream Personalization Survey shows that consumer interest in the issue is strong, with 79 percent of respondents indicating a willingness to receive personalized content and more than half of the 18-24 year olds asked expressing an interest. The study also saw an íncrease in the number of people who would be willing to trade privacy for increasingly tailored results.
These findings can likely be generalized to search users because the information required for search personalization is less intrusive than the content participants were questioned about in the survey.
Benefits and Drawbacks for Users and Site Owners
Personalization benefits users because it can help make their searches more relevant based on past search behavior. It also can help Web site owners who have excellent content and well-written Titles, since the Web sites with the “stickiest” content will be weighted more favorably. However, in both cases there is also the possibility of closing out potentially useful resources because they do not fit a user’s previous history.

In addition to good content, Web pages need good Title and Description Meta tags. Because these are displayed on the search results page, they represent the way human users will judge the site and decide whether or not to clíck through.
You can also gain by getting yourself on the Google personalized homepage of many search users. One way to do this is to offër users a feed, a Google gadget, or Add To Google buttons on your pages so users can subscribe to your content. Another tip is to put Google Bookmark buttons on your pages, such as those provided by AddThis. The more a visitor relies on your site, the better ranking it will receive when that user performs searches related to your keywords. The winners in personalized search are those who make a connection to their users because the results reward loyalty.
Implications for SEO
Increased personalization in search results has obvious implications for anyone performing search engine optimization since search results will now differ from user to user based on search history and user profile. Naturally, all queries will show a change in ranking positions between personalized and non-personalized results. Practitioners have analyzed this effect and found that results for personalized vs. non-personalized search can vary as much as 90 percent. Clearly, on page elements, particularly in the content and Meta data, will become extremely important again.
Rank Checking
The area most affected in the search optimization process is rank checking. An article by Mike Moran in Revenue January/February 2007 states, “Widespread personalization will doom traditional rank checking”. Moran also asserts, “It’s the biggest change in search marketing since paid search.”
Extensive personalization will affect the traditional rank checking process because site rankings will differ based on users’ idiosyncratic search habits. SEO analysts will be looking at average rankings rather than absolute rankings. This will force a change in search engine optimization techniques. Currently, SEO requires decision-making based partly on researching targeted keyword phrases used by leading competitors. With personalization, it becomes difficult to identify the leading competitors because all search results will differ.

Therefore, new methodologies for making search engine optimization decisions will have to be devised. Traditional SEO and on page optimization will still be very important and SEOs will need to continue to improve pages, making them superior to other pages for specific targeted keyword phrases. This will require more thorough analyses of competitor on-page and off-page factors.
The process of SEO competitor analysis will require data collection, quantitative and qualitative analyses, as well as multivariate analysis. Multivariate analyses can help determine the relative importance and influence of multiple factors compared to each other, yielding the competitive landscape for your targeted key terms. The strengths and weaknesses of this landscape will help practitioners make the SEO decisions needed for targeting the right terms for optimization.
In-depth competitor intelligence will give SEO practitioners more accurate readings of how their client’s Web pages compare to their competitors’ pages, and the result will be more accurate information than we currently get with rank checking.

The Challenge of Competitor Intelligence
In-depth competitor intelligence can reveal what’s working and what’s not for a site’s strongest competitors. It can reveal which sites are competitively strong (or weak) compared to the client’s site, regardless of what the respective ranking numbers would show with rank checking.
New age competitor intelligence will tell you what optimization factors are most important for specific competitive landscapes. Technicians will learn the true competitive nature of a keyword phrase rather that just the number of results returned for a specific query. They will know exactly what SEO factors to work in order to strengthen their client’s position rather than guesstimate based on general guidelines.
In-depth competitor intelligence will tell practitioners how to prioritize the SEO factors to be optimized, revealing semantic relationships between the client’s content, the competitors’ content, and the semantic nuances of a keyword phrase related to search personalization of user results. Optimization in the era of personalization requires robust competitive intelligence, and this will pay big dividends to those who master analyzing the competitive landscape.
It is undoubtedly true that search will change dramatically once personalization is widely adopted. However, SEO is an art that is extremely flexible and will adapt with widespread use of search history to affect rankings. SEO practitioners have always been creative, and we will develop new techniques to achieve search visibility for our clients as personalized search becomes more prevalent.

The personalisation of search results throws up a whole heap of questions which can be debated till the cows come home. But for me, the main two which need to be discussed are privacy and user experience (broad I know).

Google announced in February that it would be making a change to its google account sign in process to allow for more personalisation of search results. Basically, as far as I can gather, the change will be to make the opt out of automatic sign in box as difficult to find as possible! Im sure there are certain legislation they need to comply with but this act throws up a whole heap of arguements (which I dont really want to go into). From my investigations into personalisation (though limited) I know that it can spook people. If you dont understand the automatic sign in process and google starts telling you what you have previously searched on and what you may be interested in it can be a little big brother-esq, producing a negative user experience.

Further affects on user experience can be produced if google interprets search data based on irrelevant criteria. This has been one of the pitfalls of local search. Basing results on a users location is great if they are searching for a locally based product. But what about if there product doesnt need to be locally based, financial services for example. You dont need you mortgage lender to be based nearby because you can perform all the necessary actions over the phone or online therefore making the search results less relevant than the normal ones. Similarly with a product such as hotels. a man in manchester searching on hotels is unlikely to actually want a hotel which is in manchester, more likely he wants a hotel in a city further afield for a weekend stay for example.

Im sure that the behemoth that is google has considered all these problems and will roll out something which addresses them all. But until this is the case I have my reservations about it taking off. I am all for it, believe me, but just think there are some rather lage hurdles to overcome for the product.

Interesting thoughs on the future of search engine optimisation. The area which interests me most is that of personalisation as this, to me, is one of the key strengths of the internet. Amazon have done it for years, personalising the products offered to a return user, showing producst which may be of interest. The introduction fo this to the world of search engine marketing could change the way in which we all operate.

The Transformation Of Natural Search Optimization by Rob Garner, Wednesday, February 14, 2007

THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT natural search is coming to a crossroads. My view is that the transformation may not be so radical that everything changes, in so much as having situations where only some things become more challenging. However, the basic tenets of natural search will remain the same, only applied to more sophisticated scenarios on a personalized level, a research level, and a technical level. Here are a few thoughts on some of these key drivers in the changing landscape of natural search optimization:
Personalization. Google recently announced that it was rolling out personalized results, marking the beginning of a change in the way we approach natural search optimization campaigns. Though there is the theoretical potential for every search result page to be different, the impact is not quite as drastic as it sounds.
My basic view of optimizing for personalized results is similar to some points outlined by David Berkowitz in yesterday’s Search Insider column. His primary assertion is that the basic benchmark for optimization is still the editorial results (personalization turned off).
Make it there, and you’ll make it anywhere. Achieving top rankings in the editorial results ensures that your site is trusted, and that you created a natural presence that is best-of-class in its keyword space.
More emphasis should be placed on aggregate traffic metrics such as increased share of natural search traffic, and ultimately, increased ROI and conversions. If personalization meets its primary goal of increased relevancy, then traffic and conversions should increase to properly tuned sites.
The rise of market research in search (going beyond “keyword research”). In recognizing that personalization is a now-major factor in the way that natural search traffic is delivered, the new imperative is optimizing a site to satisfy the target customer’s desires. This is accomplished by thoroughly knowing your customer through market research, and further down the road, testing and validating through analytics and clickstream analysis. The deeper implication is that search-informed market research should be further integrated into the discovery and design phases of Web development.
The future will be in knowing what your target audience wants, knowing the language they speak and knowing how they find what they seek. Provide the content and experience they are seeking, and you will naturally match your offering to the key aspects of the personalization algorithm, such as click-through rate, time-on-site, number of page views (or in a rich app, back to “time-on-site”), internal site clickstreams, repeat visits, bookmarks, etc. Engage your target market, and the search engines will engage your site.
Today, many search firms substitute “keyword research” for true “market research.” Predicting and understanding human search intent is much more complicated than choosing keyword terms based on search frequency, and the guestimated likelihood to click through. Human search intent is as complex as human beings themselves, and market research should be a primary driver in creating exceptional search engine marketing campaigns, for both natural and paid campaigns.
SEOs will be met with increasing technical demands to address the crawlability and indexability off rich Internet applications The trend of enterprise RIA adoption is hitting its stride in 2007. The shift is essentially focused on moving from a “page-based” paradigm to a “pageless” paradigm; one that treats the Web more as an application, rather than a book. Ajax is driving the change.
Senior Google engineer Matt Cutts told Search Insider back in December that RIA-based sites are not a threat to relevancy at this time, mainly because the developers that create them are technical enough to build a second site for search engines. This statement is interesting for a couple of reasons.
The first is that it is not a threat “at this time.” This indicates that widespread adoption of RIA without a secondary technical solution for search engines could be a major threat to relevancy, as well as a threat to a company’s search presence. If the content is hidden, the engines can’t find it, and companies cannot be found.
The second implication is that to have your user-interface cake and eat it too, a progressive tech solution for search is on the menu. This will go beyond the capabilities of many search firms.
Ultimately, I don’t believe that RIA will put any SEO firms out of business, because page-based sites are not going away any time soon (not for the next 10 years, anyway). As long as there are page-based sites and the need to rank those pages, there is room for those who practice current methods. But a new breed of SEO will emerge to address the need to optimize for RIA (there are many in existence now).
The bottom line is that natural search optimization is in a state of transformation at the enterprise level. If anything has changed, it’s not that SEO is dead or dying — it’s that the bar has just been set even higher.
Rob Garner is a senior strategic planner for interactive marketing and search agency iCrossing. He is president-elect of the Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association, and also serves on the board of the Dallas/Fort Worth Interactive Marketing Association.